14 DAY TRIAL // John Riccitiello, the chief executive officer of video game publisher Electronic Arts, has said that his company is determined to be a competitive player in the first person shooter market and that he has a long term plan designed to take on the hugely successful Call of Duty franchise from rivals Activision Blizzard.
In an interview with gaming blog Kotaku, the CEO made it all sound very simple, saying that his company is guided by the principle “Make a better game”, adding that if at first they will they need to “make a better game again.”
He then went on to detail the process, stating “If I had to pick the story I'd like to play out next year is we ship a 90 and they ship an 85,” adding the rival publisher has “an awful lot of momentum without heir brand, no doubt. What I've witnessed a couple of times in the games industry is the way you unseat a market leader if you make a better game a couple of times in a row.”
It's interesting to note that John Riccitiello has not directly talked about Medal of Honor as being the main EA published competitor to Call of Duty, even though it was a beneficiary of a lot of pre-launch hype, mostly built around the developers’ decision to take the player to the modern-day conflict of Afghanistan.
Instead he focused on the work done by the studio DICE, the team which has single handedly put together Battlefield: Bad Company 2 earlier in the year and continued to deliver content for it all through the last few months and which also designed the multiplayer segment of Medal of Honor.
In order to take sales from Call of Duty Electronic Arts will need to create an experience which breaks out of the corridor shooter mold, probably embodied in the DICE-made Battlefield 3.