EA CEO John Riccitiello Steps Down, Larry Probst Steps Up

Like a boss.

People love to hate EA, apparently it's what the "cool" kids do. I just enjoy their games and will continue to do so as long as they keep being great (I didn't get SimCity so that didn't affect me at all).

You don't have to accept **** if you don't want it. If McDonalds started punching you in the dick every time you get a shamrock shake, are you gonna get a shamrock shake even if it is quite tasty?

Yeah, probably. It's a goddam shamrock shake.

Battlefield 3 Origin only
Mass Effect 3 Origin only/badstory
Dead Space 3 Cheap port with limited to no options and also Origin only
Sim City - Everything
Crysis 3 - What the ****
Crysis 2 - WHAT THE FUCK
Dragon Age 2 - WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED?

Good job, EDD.

I enjoyed all those games nonetheless, and so did the rest of you! Hating these games is just what the "cool" kids do as Jobin_Wendy said above.

Fine. If we want to get even worse lets talk about witholding the copys of Medal of Honor from reviewers until after the game comes out.

Or

We could talk about Spore which had suffered the dumbing down to a extreme and disgustingly inaccurate holistic display.

Lets also talk about EA Sports. They release the same game every year with more features tacked on. Or lets talk about the Card-collection effect which they add in FIFA and ME3 MP to do nothing but addict the user and have them spending countless coins and in some cases using malicious means to acquire these ****ing baseball cards of gaming.

And finally lets talk about these MMO's that EA has decided to make. The Secret World and SWTOR. These games are extremely undercut and have little to no end-game contents these are an extreme disservice to any MMO player who actually wants to spend time enjoying the game later on and with their pointless and inevitably become over-priced FTP garbage.

TL;DR I'm cooler than you

Also, Mass Effect 3's story was just fine if you go the extended cut DLC. It was just diagnosed with acute whiny fanboy syndrome.

No it wasn't. If you honestly think that then you know nothing of Mass effect. Especially since morality which is a key object of the game plays no role into almost any decisions you make in Mass Effect 3. This DLC changes nothing. The story was poor and the game is a reflection of that no matter how many DLC's and fan-services they give.

I believe you seem to have this disease as well. I thought it was fine.

Good games. Bad business.

I hope this works out for the best in the end...Riccitello was not perfect, but he did get the ball rolling on some good projects...and some poor decisions.

A few good games. Lots of objectionable business practices.

So does everyone feel this way with Activision?

Activision sits quietly in the corner these days and puts out more Call of Duty games. Beyond that, Activision doesn't do much in the way of douchebaggery, and if it does, nobody pays it much mind. At least CoD's servers work. Activision is still evil though, Bobby Kotick is a Cenobite, like Pinhead, only worse.

We have such sights to show you... for a fee of course.

At least Activision knows when a game series is finally dead. They axed Tony Hawk and Guitar Hero finally, someone over there has at least half a brain. EA actually has a lot of good IPs despite what people want to believe. Dragon Age, Dead Space, Mass Effect, and a few others are some of the best franchises of this generation. However, these games' sequels (except Mass Effect) tend to be a bit...long in the tooth. The only series EA needs to axe is Medal of Honor. NO ONE CARES ANYMORE! Also, I forgive EA for Need for Speed because they have been TRYING to mix it up with Shift, Hot Pursuit, and Most Wanted.

Activision has a very hands off approach to evil. They commit none themselves, save releasing a gigantic doucher training program (see CoD multiplayer) to fill my homeplanet with entitled 14 year olds who savagely berate my grandmother and play with fake guns. I hope you're all ready in a decade or so when Activision sends out their mind control frequency to all of these child soldiers and takes over the world.

Could... I don't know... someone who likes video games get the job this time? Maybe? Please?

I don't use Origin because I play EA games on consoles. But I worry that Origin might make an appearance on the next generation of consoles. Hopefully they will use this as a learning experience and forget about always on DRM.

I don't use Origin because I play EA games on consoles. But I worry that Origin might make an appearance on the next generation of consoles. Hopefully they will use this as a learning experience and forget about always on DRM.

i sure do love watching EA burn

Wasn't Probst in charge of liquidating Origin Systems back in '02?

Yes. He is actually the reason EA was in dire straits until Riccitello took over and actually turned them around for a few years...

I goofed a reply. It's just below but I'm giving you this message so you get an alert.

Part of me wants to be very smug about that. Probst is the reason why System Shock 3 is unlikely to ever get made. Probst killed some of the greatest studios in history. Some might wish to lay Bioware's soon-to-be corpse at Riccitiello's feet but Bioware did themselves in and they were never that great. Their work was never as far-reaching or of the independent worth of Black Isle's games. But along with Origin they killed off Westwood during Probst's years. They scattered the teams that buit one of the core forms of the RTS (the others being Warcraft-likes, Myth-likes, AoE-likes and a whole list of 'other' like Warzone 2100, Dark Omen and Homeworld) which has never been done right since they were scattered. Riccitiello may have unintentionally accelerated the course towards the industry's forthcoming second great collapse (putting more eggs in fewer baskets and having to therefore guard them more carefully stagnates creativity) but, to paraphrase Gibbon, his vice was an excess of virtue - he believed in his developers and in their work and gave them as much support as he could to build a bedrock of AAA releases whose profits could keep the company in money. Would Probst have returned the rights to Wasteland to Brian Fargo?

Like I said, part of me wants to be smug. The other part of me knows damn well there's no good news here.