{"id":19166,"date":"2013-03-26T11:51:37","date_gmt":"2013-03-26T16:51:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=19166"},"modified":"2013-03-26T11:51:37","modified_gmt":"2013-03-26T16:51:37","slug":"experienced-points-how-to-fix-electronic-arts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=19166","title":{"rendered":"Experienced Points: How to Fix Electronic Arts"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><table   class=\"\" cellpadding='0' cellspacing='0' border='0' align='center'><tr><td><img src='https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/images\/splash_xp.jpg' class='insetimage'   alt='splash_xp.jpg' title='splash_xp.jpg'\/><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n<p>I admit <a href=\"http:\/\/www.escapistmagazine.com\/articles\/view\/columns\/experienced-points\/10252-How-to-Fix-Electronic-Arts\" title=\"How to Fix Electronic Arts\">I&#8217;m preaching to the choir<\/a>, but sometimes it&#8217;s just important to say things so that you can say you said them. Now I&#8217;m on record saying that EA needs someone who is an active part of gaming culture in order to make meaningful and productive decisions. <\/p>\n<p>I suspect a few people will mis-read this or take my thoughts to some sort of extreme and argue that (say) Richard Garriott would make a horrible CEO of EA. Of course, I&#8217;m not suggesting they just find someone with no other qualifications other than &#8220;really enjoys playing and producing videogames&#8221;. The person also needs to be smart, well-spoken, have solid business acumen, and a concrete understanding of what&#8217;s wrong with the company. Is that asking too much? No, not for ~$1 million in take-home salary and a few million more in options and bonuses. I&#8217;m not against ludicrous executive salaries, but I <em>am<\/em> against offering ludicrous salaries to ordinary people. <\/p>\n<p>My fear is that EA is just going to find another fifty-ish money-man to run the place. They&#8217;ve consistently made that same bad decision for the past decade, and doing something radically different from that would require a change in culture or powerful external forces. Yes, EA isn&#8217;t nearly living up to their potential, but they aren&#8217;t in severe enough trouble for the leadership to do something wild or unexpected. You can&#8217;t overcome that sort of organizational inertia without a good old-fashioned panic. EA is struggling enough to know they&#8217;re in trouble, but not nearly enough to take the sort of extreme corrective action they need. <\/p>\n<p>As always, I would love to be proven wrong about this. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I admit I&#8217;m preaching to the choir, but sometimes it&#8217;s just important to say things so that you can say you said them. Now I&#8217;m on record saying that EA needs someone who is an active part of gaming culture in order to make meaningful and productive decisions. I suspect a few people will mis-read [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[102],"tags":[155],"class_list":["post-19166","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weekly-column","tag-experienced-points"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19166","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19166"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19166\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19166"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}