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.
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 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.-
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.-
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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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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!
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