We would all love to see that happening

Feb 25, 2008 08:44 GMT  ·  By

If you thought there is nothing or nobody able to slap EA and at least make them wish to create some better games and not only sequels that are generally worse than the originals, well... you were wrong. At least that is what John Riccitiello, head of Electronic Arts, has said recently, while showing a chart that made him really unhappy.

The chart represents Electronic Arts' average score on Metacritic - 72 last year, compared to 77 one year before. So EA shouldn't listen to Tom Petty's wonderful song Free Falling. Really.

However, it seems that John Riccitiello not only wants his company to put an end to this pain, but turn things around, too. According to him, the Metacritic score is the most important thing regarding EA, since the website has become one of the most influential voices in the gaming industry today.

"There is nothing acceptable about that," Riccitiello said about the score. "Our core game titles are accurately measured and summarized by these assessments, and that is a very big deal. So this is perhaps, to me, the most important chart in this presentation, we need to recover here."

However, it seems that there are two ways of getting a good or, at least, a better Metacritic score and one of them is unacceptable: according to Dan Hsu, editor-in-chief of EGM, sometimes it happens that the giant game companies say to the reviewers something like: "'Hey, you're the lowest score on Metacritic, can you change it?". And if we are to remember the whole Jeff Gerstman scandal, we will believe him.

However, Riccitiello says that is not the way EA is planning to get better scores (thank God!). "The process often gets in the way more than it helps," he said. "That sort of circus has unfortunately sort of defined our company for too long. And it's not a good process." We're glad somebody has finally figured that out. Waiting to see the results, John!