IndustryGamers - Informing the Games Industry

EA CEO: Treyarch 'Far From Proven' in Eyes of Consumers

Posted December 17, 2010 by James Brightman

You may remember EA's executives during the year repeatedly talking about the publisher taking back the shooter category crown from Activision. The Medal of Honor reboot was certainly a part of the shooter genre attack, and while EA Europe VP Patrick Soderlund said at one point that the game didn't meet EA's own quality expectations, EA CEO John Riccitiello has told IndustryGamers that the title absolutely did exceed EA's expectations. Riccitiello also cast some doubt on the state of developers within Activision, when we asked him how he felt about taking back the shooter category in the wake of Black Ops' blockbuster success.

"We’ll do north of ten million units in shooters in calendar 2010 between Battlefield: Bad Company and Medal of Honor, up from two (million). I think we’re the only major player with a 500 percent growth, is one observation," he began. "The second observation is I don’t know what you heard about Medal of Honor. I think it ended up in the mid-70s reviewed, and it was polarizing for some people for a variety of reasons. It exceeded our expectations going in. We knew we were building a game on Unreal; we knew that it had limitations in terms of what it was going to do, but by and large if you listened to our last earnings call, we stated unequivocally that it exceeded expectations. Activision will do 25 million on the tail of last year’s Modern Warfare 2 and the start of this year’s Black Ops, and then probably something similar next year. But it took them, what, five or six editions to get into double digit millions?"  

Riccitiello continued, questioning Activision's leadership and Treyarch's ability: "This management team started with this goal really two and a half years ago and our first entry really was Battlefield: Bad Company, and you’ll see a lot about Battlefield 3 next year, which I think is, at least from our perspective, designed to be the one that is the big leap forward; the one that is going to help a lot. I don’t know that having two guys that probably don’t play the games, in the form of the CEO of Vivendi and the CEO of Activision, come out and say 'Treyarch is our lead developer,' like you could anoint that. They didn’t make a 90-rated game; I think it’s 86 now. I don’t think review scores are the be-all, end-all, but we all know a mid-90 when we see it, but this was mid-80s. I don’t think you could anoint them by an executive saying, 'it’s so.' The question, I think, really is, 'what developer is going to put forward the next great FPS that sort of follows [what Infinity Ward did]?” It’s wishful thinking, and let’s hope for Activision’s sake they’re right. I think it’s far from proven that the gaming consumer views a product from Treyarch in the same category as a product from what was Infinity Ward."

As for EA's continued assault on the shooter category, Riccitiello added that "next year we’ll make a lot more progress. We’ve got a couple of third-party games in the form of Crysis 2 and Bulletstorm, and then our big focus is Battlefield 3 in the second half of the year. I’d be shocked if we didn’t take a notch out of [Activision]."

James Brightman has been covering the games industry since 2003 and has been an avid gamer ever since the days of Atari and Intellivision. He was previously the EIC of GameDaily Biz.