EA Rides Higher Quality Games To Higher Sales
May 12th, 2010 | Written by Anthony Perez | Topic: Industry News
It looks like there is hope for this godforsaken industry after all. For years we had to deal with crappy licensed games and sequels. And in the middle of a recession where companies are cutting corners as often as employees (though that’s been slowly changing), EA recently announced that they “beat their revenue expectations for the fourth quarter.” Why should you care? Because EA did so after making a point to improve the quality of their games.
During the year, EA had 20 titles with an average Metacritic rating of 80 or above. Metacritic aggregates reviews on other sites and scores them on a scale of zero to 100.
“We are rebuilding EA’s reputation for quality with consumers and believe that will translate into benefits for investors,” said John Riccitiello, chief executive at EA.
Last year we saw them release some very good games like Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Mass Effect 2 and Brutal Legend. It’s also proof that EA is backing up its talk when it voiced concern over its review scores.
[In 2007] According to Metacritic’s pooling of EA’s releases over the last year, the average review score has fallen from 77 to 72 revealed Riccitiello before outlining his concern in relation to the performance of EA’s software.“Our core game titles are accurately measured and summarized by these assessments, and that is a very big deal,” said Riccitello during a meeting with Wall Street analysts. “So this is perhaps, to me, the most important chart in this presentation, we need to recover here.”
It’s awesome that EA is following through on their promise to make better games. In 2 years, their average review score has gone up almost 10 percentage points.
But it’s not all great news. EA’s strongest sales still came from sequels to strong franchises like Beatles: Rock Band, The Sims 3, Left 4 Dead 2, FIFA Soccer 10, Madden NFL 10, and…well, you get the point.
And while the quality of those games was indeed high, we saw risks on new projects like Dead Space and Mirror’s Edge from EA fail pretty miserably (at least for the a megapublisher with high expectations like EA.) We covered it last year when our Andrew Giese called out gamers in his piece, No Innovation? Blame Yourselves: Risk-Taking EA Loses $641 Million.
Still, kudos to EA for staying committed to developing higher quality games when they could probably coast on franchise names alone.
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Comment by ChrisSelogy on the May 12th, 2010 at 8:13 pm
Bad Company 2 and Mass Effect 2 came out this year. ;p
Comment by TonyP on the May 12th, 2010 at 8:56 pm
It still counts as for the Q4 2009 fiscal year
Comment by ChrisSelogy on the May 12th, 2010 at 9:24 pm
You didn't mention anything about it being a fiscal year, just last year.
Comment by Andrew_G on the May 16th, 2010 at 3:15 pm
Despite the fact that EA is making quality games, they still posted a $677 million loss (http://www.joystiq.com/2010/05/11/ea-posts-677-million-loss-in-fy2010-alongside-downed-revenues/) for FY 2010. Granted, that's better than what they predicted, and the quality games are a huge part of that, but $677 million is still not just a drop in the ocean even for a company as large as EA.
Maybe this time next year they'll actually have a profit to speak of, but until then we can't be entirely sure that making "good" games is statisticaly significantly better than making "safe" games.
Comment by TonyP on the May 17th, 2010 at 4:12 pm
I would say that it doesn't have a significant impact right now, and it may not even seem smart, but I think EA sees a shift in the industry. Activision is larger than EA right now. Activision is also involved in a lot of the same game genres. With more and more games becoming multi-platform and sales being nearly equal across all of them, EA may believe that if they can gain a reputation for making higher-quality games in the same genre as Activision, that more people will choose the EA product.
So this seems like a more long-term brand building play. They could be right or they could be wrong.
Comment by Porter on the May 29th, 2010 at 8:34 pm
As far as I'm concerned, long term, the company will be much better off taking some risks and getting some new franchises under their belt. Safe games work, but they'll only work so long, people will get bored eventually, or another company will do the same thing, but better, and then take over the one strong point EA currently banks on. Don't put all your eggs in one basket, expand to something new.