Recently, EA’s CEO stepped down. Part of it comes in speculation of the disaster for the latest SimCity DRM issues. However, it was said that EA’s projections were on a downward slope, which motivated this (more than likely). The SimCity DRM issue more than likely just highlighted one of the problems with EA in general.
The real story regarding EA though is that the company has been on a very slippery slope for years. All the acquisitions have shown nothing but failures and has caused some of the best brands to be shunned. Command and Conquer, Ultima, and now SimCity all have fallen victim to EA’s corporate greed and strict business mentality. Rather than pushing out high quality games, marketing and dates caused many of these titles to fail in creating half assed products.
It’s a sad state of affairs in the gaming world. However, the problem is that these monolithic corporations have become too concerned about quarterly revenues and no longer realize that games and brands especially have extremely loyal and vocal followings.
I don’t see the change of guard at EA to do much because the root cause of the problems are far deeper. This would be the same case if Blizzard/Activision’s Bobby Kotick stepped down. Just another corpturkey would replace him to appease shareholders.
On the other hand, what this means is that gamers will be looking for new publishers to come up with exciting brands, giving more opportunities to upcoming companies. Also, Kickstarter is providing a nice independent platform for gaming franchises, some of which are being run by people who worked on these brands before.
For major game publishers though, they need to wake up to the realities of the gaming genre and re-examine their roots rather than quarterly revenues. If they don’t, gamers will simply continue to leave in troves as the brand and trust slowly erode.