14 DAY TRIAL // Last week, Mitch Lasky, a former EA executive, started a bit of a turf war with his former employer, and mainly with John Riccitiello. He blamed Riccitiello for running a “bankrupt strategy” with Electronic Arts and that, “Since JR took over, the company has destroyed over $11 billion in market value.” More so, he continued by attacking the publisher's digital distribution planning, saying that, “EA is in the wrong business, with the wrong cost structure and the wrong team, but somehow they seem to think that it is going to be a smooth, two-year transition from packaged goods to digital. Think again.”
And there are plenty of people that share his opinion, as EA announced last Monday that it would miss its December quarter predictions, making this a twice-in-a-row performance. The company has also dropped the number of releases it has in a year, trying to focus more on fewer, big projects, rather than on an ocean of mediocre ones. More so, it was even forced to make dramatic personal cuts, firing more than 1,500 people and shutting down Pandemic Studios. And while Lasky's accusations seem to be backed up by numbers, it would seem like there are some personal reasons behind them as well.
EA didn't take Lasky's comments without fighting back, and made its response very clear while talking to GameBeat. “Mitch needs to try de-caf,” the EA head of corporate communications, Jeff Brown, said. “It's never easy being turned down for a job, but most people don't spend three years obsessing about it. Since Mitch left EA, Apple invented the iPhone, Facebook evolved to include a gaming platform and EA Mobile became the world leader.”
Back in 2005, Lasky sold a mobile business to EA and then resigned from the company's board just one year later. Whether this is his true motivation for attacking EA isn't really that important, and what stands out more is EA's response. Usually, this would have been completely ignored, as just another voice that stabs at a big company, but if EA bothered to reply, and with such harsh words, there must be more to this story than meets the eye. All we can do for now is recline out seats, grab a bag of popcorn, and wait for Lasky's reply.