Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello has been a talkative boy today, and lately the silver-maned executive has been talking about game quality. According to Riccitiello, EA is prepared to shut down several in-development titles a year if they are not reaching certain standards. Kind of like how they killed Bullfrog, except with a reason this time.
“When something’s not meeting expectations… you can course correct by giving it more time, more money, changing the concept or killing the game. If you’re committed to quality, you take one of those paths. If you preclude any one of those paths, quality will suffer.
EA will kill a game or two a year. Forever.”
Brutal stuff, but I imagine that EA’s standards of quality are a little lower than some. In fact, Tiberium must have been really bad for EA to kill it off.
That said, it’s a good idea to shut down a game if there’s no chance of it ever being good. Sometimes a title is going to suck no matter how much you try and polish it. I dare say a fair few games over the years would have benefitted from being put out of their misery.
