More signs that EA is learning?

I just read this article at Wired. At the DICE Summit, EA’s CEO John Riccitiello said that EA had mismanaged their acquisitions of several companies, including Bullfrog, Westwood and Origin (interestingly, I mentioned exactly this in a comment about a week ago). Said Riccitiello, “We at EA blew it, and to a degree I was involved in these things, so I blew it.”

An observation he had made was that the people who made those companies great left or felt marginalized after EA’s takeover. “When I talked to the creators that populated these companies at the time, they felt like they were buried and stifled,” said Riccitiello. It is refreshing to see EA acknowledge past mistakes. It helps their credibility, because they really did blow it with those companies, big time. It’s far, far from enough to repair the credibility lost from how they dealt with those companies, though. But it’s a start.

He indicated that things are changing at EA; that they are nowadays giving companies such as Bioware and Maxis more leeway in how they operate.

Riccitiello further speculated that the practice of the larger publishers acquiring both developers as well as other publishers will continue. He argued that their security is increased by being under EA’s umbrella, while they can still retain unique goals.

Sounds better than what EA did before, but we will have to wait and see how it plays out in practice. I’m still uneasy about there being fewer and fewer publishers, and fewer independent developers as well. It’s from those places that a lot of brilliant stuff comes, and we’ve yet to see if more of EA’s studios will be able to produce something of equal novelty.