Andrew Wilson and the future of EA
https://www.ea.com/news/our-next-chapter
Well, the purchase and privatization of EA is now complete. Above is what the CEO had to say about it. Mostly it was reshuffling of upper management and a lot of kumbaya about the future of gaming.
A couple of questions I would have liked to hear addressed:
- How does EA plan to continue to produce new products while saddled with billions in new debt?
- Does Apex (or for that matter, Respawn) even have a future within the company, since, while it's been a "succuess," it has certainly not approached the success of EA's sports titles, or games like Sims. Just ask the developer of HiFi Rush what counts as success these days.
Shuttering Respawn could end up being exactly the kind of quick accounting trick that makes the company look leaner for five seconds without hurting any of the real EA cash cows. And even if they don't kill Respawn out of the gate, can anyone seriously imagine that Apex will get anything but the barest maintenance for the foreseeable future? Has it got anything more than that for the past few years? What of Apex 2.0? Another victim of the unsustainable acquisition frenzy that killed so many titles, and studios, when Microsoft bought Activision? All of this corporate ownership is great for the previous owners who got the pay day, but has mostly proved disastrous for gamers, gaming, game developers, creativity, and stewardship.
If you thought that EA was the post child for the en**bleep**tification of the gaming industry... you haven't seen anything yet.
