I've been thinking about some posts about certain topics, like Penny Arcade on the weed debate (discussion? If this is politics, why is everyone being so calm about it?) here in Washington, or my personal epileptic trees on what happened to the trademarks for the G1 My Little Pony characters, but something awesome distracted me.
So, John Riccitello is "resigning". It was a good day.
That is to say, he is leaving the company before the board finally tires of his lying ass and fires him, IMHO. The only way this could be a better day for me would be if he was literally committing seppiku, to atone for his crimes, against software development.
Reading his farewell address is particularly sweet. You see all those unpleasant things he is saying? (Unless you are one of the EA shareholders who his is desperately trying to assuage, EA being strong is not good news for the game industry.) Remember that in Riccitello Town, it is always opposite day.
One of three things is true: He is a pathological liar with no imagination, he lives in a particularly warped delusion, or he is some sort of Bizarro-World prophet. Whatever the reason, whenever he says anything, just assume that the exact opposite of that is true. See why I so enjoy reading this letter?
Those of you who haven't been forced to spend the last five years, listening to me rant about how EA is bad for the games industry, it's customers and also bad for it's long-term shareholders, might be wondering why I feel such joy at this turn. Basically, I told everyone I know that this day would come, and the sweet, hot power of raw vindication is flowing through my veins. It's pretty awesome.
Riccitello's version of EA is basically the Emperor's New Clothes Scam; it's only a matter of time before someone publicly questions the authoritative "truth" and the whole house of cards comes undone. You see, under Riccitello, EA ceased to be a massive hype engine dedicated to selling the video games it's developers delivered (a "game publisher" to use the parlance), and became a massive hype engine dedicated to selling it's own stock (a "Blue Sky" racket).
Now, this isn't a Blue Sky job in the strictest, most-traditional sense, as the EA name actually does include a lot of assets, which it's stockholder's nominally "own". However, EA does not generally leverage most of these assets to make money, it leverages them to create the illusion that it might use them to make money in the future, while using the resulting investment capital to acquire more assets to waste.
They literally buy up successful or well-liked developers, scuttle the development team, and then back-burner all the juicy IPs they just dropped a few million on. A development studio is basically three parts, leadership, the dev team's contracts, and the IP and consumer goodwill left from it's past projects. If you buy out the leadership, fire the dev team and then just hoard the IP, you're not investing capital, you're wasting money.
Owning an IP, even if you are just putting it in the wine cellar to marinate in nostalgia for a few years, comes with costs. You have to renew and defend your trademarks or they will slip into the public domain, and getting them back out would be even more expensive. Without dev teams to milk games and t-shirts out of them, your brands cease to be an asset, and still remain a source of liability.
This is like a man selling off his only flour mill, to help him buy up half the worlds entire supply of grain, and to rent silos to store it in. There are fundamental questions about what he actually plans to do with it, and the only guarantee is that you will not like the answers, especially if he owes you money.
Granted, there are a few IP that EA has a proven track record for making and selling: their own. EA Sports (including FIFA and Madden) and Battlefield often turn tidy profits, to help the Juggernaut distract investors from the fact that only these, it's highest profile successes, are often very successful at all.
In fact, the few major financial "successes" that EA has earned with it's acquired IP, have typically been "franchise killers" games that sold well in the first few weeks, that EA assures it's shareholders are the most important, but suffered early sales fatigue due to poor reviews and bad word-of-mouth. We're talking about games so bad that even people who didn't play them are leery of trusting the brand again, and the word "sequel" itself has been tainted. (Remember when a sequel implied "more of a thing that was well known for being good" and not "corporate leeches bought the name of something you once loved, to defraud you in a legal fashion"? EA didn't do that alone, but they hammered more than their share of nails into this coffin.) Expect to see the names "Maxis" and "SimCity" join the list, of once valuable names rendered nearly worthless by the EA digestive tract.
It might seem unfair to heap the ill doings of a massive corporate monolith at the feet of one man, but a company's tone is set from the top, as they say. It is deeply impossible for a competent CEO to manage a company this deeply dysfunctional for half a decade and fail to even begin to address it's issues. With Ricitello at the helm the monster grew only more monstrous, until it began to collapse under it's own hideous weight, and people finally see that it is not a fearsome giant, but a piteous, shambling mutant.
The finally galling fact is, that there's a certain amount of sour grapes in my schadenfreude. Ricitello had access to incredible amounts of money and power. He had the resources and connections to do incredible, great things for game development as an art, and as an industry. I would kill to have that kind of power for a single year; he had five, and he caused nothing but harm to the people and the economy I dream to see grow strong.
What can you say about a man who had everything you ever wanted, and then pissed it away without even managing to accomplish any particularly selfish ends? He could have paid himself just as much in salary and bonuses running a successful and positive publishing outlet. He'd still have his recently destroyed good name, and his lucrative executive career, too. Was he evil, or just really, really stupid?
This post ends, not with a "Fuck Yeah!" or a "Screw you, Riccitello!"
--but with a, "What were you even trying to accomplish?"
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