John Riccitiello Says Failure Is Central to Future EA Success

John Riccitiello, who is the chief executive officer of video game publisher Electronic Arts, has told an audience of graduating students that failure is central to all experiences and that success is linked inextricably to it.

He told an audience at UC Berkley that, “You will fail. That is, if you want to succeed in any way that really matters.”

Riccitiello then used the period when he first took over leadership at publisher Electronic Arts as an example of how leaders need to learn from failure and then lead their companies to better times.

He said, “The internet was about to do to the game industry what it had done to music, movies and newspapers. We were facing a world going through unbelievable change with the rise of smartphones, social networks, and more recently the iPad, each of which has turned out to be a platform where gaming is the number one application.”

The problems of Electronic Arts were exacerbated by the world wide economic recession, which at first was supposed not to hit the video game industry, and the CEO created a plan to pull EA out of its troubles by laying off quite a few employees and by pushing the concept that the focus needs to be quality and not quantity of games launched.

Riccitiello admitted that the process of transformation was still ongoing at Electronic Arts and that he only recently had “a few wins” although he previously lost a number of friends because of the harsh measures.

The publisher is preparing a number of big titles for this year, with the leading edge being Battlefield 3, the new first-person shooter from DICE, which is being prepared for the fall and should take over the first-person shooter crown from Call of Duty and Activision Blizzard.