EA Sports Executive VP Andrew Wilson appointed new EA CEO

Former EA Sports Executive Vice President Andrew Wilson has been appointed the new CEO for Electronic Arts.

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EA has appointed a new CEO, following the resignation of John Riccitiello earlier this year. Former EA Sports Executive Vice President Andrew Wilson has been tapped to take the reins for the publishing giant.

"Our focus on our talent, our brands and our platform together with our investment in next-generation consoles, mobile and PC free-to-play, as part of our ongoing transition to digital, is right," reads a statement from Wilson. "But we have plenty of work ahead to ensure our collective success."

Wilson has been with EA since 2000. While he has been the public face for EA Sports, he also recently expressed a desire to refocus Origin as a "service to gamers, not as a means to drive transactions."

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Ozzie has been playing video games since picking up his first NES controller at age 5. He has been into games ever since, only briefly stepping away during his college years. But he was pulled back in after spending years in QA circles for both THQ and Activision, mostly spending time helping to push forward the Guitar Hero series at its peak. Ozzie has become a big fan of platformers, puzzle games, shooters, and RPGs, just to name a few genres, but he’s also a huge sucker for anything with a good, compelling narrative behind it. Because what are video games if you can't enjoy a good story with a fresh Cherry Coke?

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  • reply
    September 17, 2013 2:30 PM

    Ozzie Mejia posted a new article, EA Sports Executive VP Andrew Wilson appointed new EA CEO.

    Former EA Sports Executive Vice President Andrew Wilson has been appointed the new CEO for Electronic Arts.

    • reply
      September 17, 2013 3:02 PM

      Well, if Riccitiello's successor was going to be Frank Gibeau or Peter Moore, that decision would probably have been made prior to E3. But when I saw the headline, I said, "I'm okay with Wilson as CEO."

      The CEO of EA has a lot of cleaning up to do, both with shareholder appeasement to get recurring profits again, as well as with customer service to make sure that EA's titles aren't the butt of recurring jokes (Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Dead Space 3, and Medal of Honor come to mind). The console generation transition gives a good opportunity to shift on that front, but Origin needs to become a viable service for PC games, classical model as well as free-to-play. The 24-hour satisfaction guarantee is a start, but ultimately EA's Origin department needs to keep working.

      Shareholder appeasement (quarterly profits, dividends, etc.) is short-term, but long-term is ensuring that EA doesn't make bumbling "have their cake and eat it too" mistakes, like Dead Space 3's "retail and freemium" economy, and of course SimCity's "We need to make this game always-on; let's code it in and use Amazon EC2 as a virtual machine farm!" debacle.

      • reply
        September 17, 2013 3:08 PM

        I'm still surprised, personally. I expected someone from outside, like Probst (arguably their most successful CEO) was. Moore or Gibeau also seemed more likely choices. Very odd.

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          September 17, 2013 5:25 PM

          Aye, I am very surprised as were my peers at EA. At this point I figured the focus was on external candidates, but perhaps not. Not in sports so don't know much about his leadership style or acumen. The choice makes certain symbolic sense given his recent leadership of Origin (and Asian publishing) and the transition to digital. A bit ironic given our recent quarterly meetings... I guess NBA Live is definitely shipping this year ;)

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        September 17, 2013 5:47 PM

        Dead Space 3 was awesome.

    • reply
      September 17, 2013 3:04 PM

      His first order of business should be to tell his developers to stop using lens flare, dirty lens and bloom effects! I find EA games unplayable and have stopped buying them because of this sort of crap:

      https://www.google.com/search?q=syndicate+bloom&tbm=isch
      https://www.google.com/search?q=battlefield+3+lens+flare&tbm=isch
      https://www.google.com/search?q=mass+effect+3+lens+flare&tbm=isch

      The only playable game was Crysis 3 because it had an option to turn lens effects off. It's so much better without them:

      http://www.tweakguides.com/20_c3_lensflares_comparison.html

      Every game should have this option!

      • reply
        September 17, 2013 5:46 PM

        Crysis 3 wasn't developed by EA, so I guess they are 100% unplayable.

      • reply
        September 17, 2013 11:40 PM

        I wholeheartedly agree. Lens/filmic/movie post effects should be optional in EVERY game.

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