Why Game Development Experience is Largely Overrated

Why the "experienced" old dog game developer probably hasn't learned the tricks you really need.

Have you ever had the experience of listening to an exalted Deity of Game Design - and you suddenly realize what they are preaching is hopelessly out of date? Let's face it, experience in game development is highly over-rated. As hiring managers, we chase experienced candidates because it gives us a warm, reassuring feeling to have a CV with a long list of years behind it. Hiring is scary - a bad hire can be disastrous in so many different ways so hiring "experience" is a balm against our fear of lost development time, burned budgets, morale problems, lawsuits, etc.

The problem is that "experience" is an illusion.

Video Game Management and Radically Rethinking Compensation

The incentives video game companies dangle to make us productive - options and bonuses - are an insult to creative people. 

Every video game company wants to motivate their game developers to get the maximum creative juice and effort out of them. It's in everybody's interest to incentive game developers to great work. But the funny thing is that incentives don't work.

Let me repeat that for the dimmer light bulbs in the back of the room.

Why Video Game Developers Hate Business Types

Pull up a comfy chair Mr. Business Suit Guy and please allow me to explain to why game developers hate your guts.

I know, it's practically a cliche - video game developers don't get along so well with the business types. "But why?" you ask. "Don't I smile enough in meetings, chit-chat in the break room and throw up the high fives in the hallways?"

Make no mistake - things seem cordial on the surface but we game developers seethe with anger and resentment towards you clean-shirt-with-no-holes-that-lacks-a-video-game-logo types.

It's instinctual - and here's why:

The Game Industry - Breaking Down the Console Business Numbers

For game development execs at E3, I'll expose Kinect's business problems with easy-to-grasp bullet points, pictures and expletives.

Okay, I admit I have already offered a few choice comments about how Natal, er, excuse me, Microsoft's Kinect is an admission the video game industry's console business is effing broke. But it's such a good topic, I cannot resist flogging the dead horse...er, I mean, thoughtfully exploring the topic in careful non-incendiary terms.

Video Game Design: Striving for Perfect v. Good Enough

When is a video game shippable? When it's as perfect as it can be - or when it's good enough to not embarrass a game dev?

More than a few video game designers have a few credits on our resume which we are, shall we say, less than proud of. Let's face it - most of us have a few real stinkers. Nobody sets out to make a bad game but sometimes circumstances dictate otherwise. Video game development is a commercial art. So by definition, game designers struggle to balance the demands of a business alongside their creative aspirations. Eventually, everybody needs to ship or suffer the ignominious fate of Duke Nukem Forever. But the eternal question for game developers is when is the product done?

Starting a Game Company the Way for Developers to Survive?

Are game designers an endangered species? Is the new breed of game developer the "Game Entrepreneur-nus Rex"?

Game development is in upheaval. It's being shaken by the seismic forces of online and mobile gaming rising up from the bottom while the imminent deep impact of crushing AAA mega-title development costs comes streaking out of the sky. The products that are relevant to the market are changing with the mid-range titles eking out an existence in a precarious niche.

Game Developers: The Argument for Taming the Business Side

Your typical game developer has mixed feelings about business types. In the way a mongoose feels about a cobra.

It's something in the DNA of most game developers. They're instinctively repelled by talk of Brooks Brothers, ties and addressable markets. Many game developers wear their ignorance of business issues as a badge of honor. To be a "suit" is a bad thing. But there's actually a pretty good case for every dyed-in-the-world game developer to master the game of business.

5 Game Industry Stories to Make You Smart and 1 to Make You Dumb

Here's your Friday recap of 5 stories to make you a smarter game developer - and 1 to make you dumber.

1. Red Dead Redemption looks to be a big hit for Take Two. They moved 250K copies on the 1st weekend in just the United Kingdom. This is a win for Rock Star and Take Two, for while the company has GTA, those do take a bit of time to develop. Wall Street likes it when a company makes a profit every year.

Back Again For More: Sequels in the Video Game Industry

If your video game idea is so awesome, then why not double your fun and make it again?

One of the things you notice in the game industry is sequels. Lots and lots of sequels. A mountain of sequels. Holy crap, there's a lot of sequels.

This is not because game designers as breed can be a bit repetitive, sometimes unoriginal in their thinking and have a tendency to lock their jaws on to something with the tenacity of a demented bulldog.

Dear Jesus, Won't You Fund My Video Game Start-up?

First, let me thank you Jesus for hearing my video game company pitch. 

It wasn't easy getting your Sand Hill Road address but I appreciate you making time for a meeting.

I figure, with you being the Lord and omniscient, you've probably heard about the whole real life as a video game design thing. The idea that we can use video game mechanics to make everything from buying toothpaste to filing your taxes to exercising a part of a big game design that you get points for.

Well, here's my pitch to you Jesus:

World of Churchcraft.

The Apocalyptic Future of a World Ruled by Game Design

Many game designers feel the Sith Overlords have made them an offer to join the Dark Side. 

The hot topic de jour in game design is the notion that game-like mechanisms will become pervasive in the real world. Level up your Microsoft Office skills and unlock an achievement for filing your taxes early. The utopian view presents games as a way to change the world for the better ("better carpool today if I'm going to earn that Al Gore Green Citizen badge...")

The social gaming gold rush - and why you missed it

Opportunity is timing. Right now, many game designers see social gaming as the opportunity of their lifetime (or at least, this generation of computer gaming). But for most, the window of opportunity to score big in social gaming has already closed.

Most American's don't like to hear that a good deal of success is based on luck. It's ingrained in our culture and mythology that through hard work, anyone can achieve greatness. And one of the amazing things about America is that people can actually achieve greatness based on innate talent and hard work. But to deny that good old fashioned chance doesn't play a role is simply naive. Put it this way - where would Apple be if Steve Jobs had had the misfortune of being hit by a bus when crossing El Camino Real in Cupertino one day? Would we have the Beatles if Lennon and McCartney hadn't met at a Quarrymen concert? A random turn of events can be the difference between greatness and obscurity.

Right now, the gaming world is abuzz about social gaming. Or, more specifically, the business savvy types are frothing with excitement about companies like Zynga and Playfish which are getting multi-million and billion dollar valuations. And while many game developers view offerings such as Farmville or Pet Society as a slightly less entertaining game than Microsoft Excel, a host of developers are jumping ship from traditional gaming giants to take up residence at the new hot thing.

Now, headlong gold rushes to California are nothing new. Perhaps I'm bit jaded as I witnessed first hand the boom years of the dot-coms and saw friends and colleagues become millionaires literally overnight - while others poured their lives and health into startups that were destined to be punch lines in business books. But its almost a law of nature that by the time you see the big rush - most of the gold has already been mined. Anyone expecting to be the next Zynga is in for a big disappointment. The opportunity has already past - and guess what, Zynga is already the next Zynga.

Zynga benefited from a unique set of conditions which aren't likely to repeat themselves. Their success was built on the back of Facebook and its explosive growth. Facebook provided an opportunity to reach an audience with almost no cost - and then continuously build on that audience through viral mechanisms. Whether you consider the mechanisms employed spam or not, their success in bootstrapping Zynga is undeniable. But the folks at Facebook aren't exactly morons. They recognized that they were becoming a platform for games and were risking losing control of their platform. So they changed the rules.

The early days of Facebook games were the Wild West. Lawlessness and obnoxious spamming was the rule of the day. But life on the frontier always settles down eventually. Inevitably, a sheriff moves in and tames the more bothersome troublemakers. While the West has hardly been won, we've seen a big shift from roaring 49ers boom town to a more stable frontier town. Growth is still impressive - but we are quite simply not going to see another Zynga because the tools that Zynga used to grow it's business at such a phenomenal rate are no longer available. The world has changed and moved on.

Furthermore, Zynga has grabbed some of the best land. They have build an audience of such density, they can bootstrap a new game into millions of daily unique visitors simply by virtue of referencing the new game from their existing games. It's a crucial bit of leverage that you don't get until your audience is in the millions.

To be sure, there are still more success stories to come in social gaming. A game designer making the leap to one of these companies can definitely enjoy success and some even argue that we have yet to see our killer app or defining game in the space. But the social gaming industry has already established its 800 pound gorilla, as well as the 400 orangutan, 200 pound chimpanzee and even 98 pound lemur. New successes in social gaming are going to be about carving out a niche in the context of the existing players - or finding a new unexploited frontier.

For that's the real trick. Having the insight, timing - and just plain luck - to recognize when a golden opportunity is knocking. Game designers with dreams of social gaming gold should probably temper their expectations - and be on the lookout for the next phenomenon. And don't worry, if history is any indication, it should arrive in the next decade - so better sharpen those skills now.

- Sean Dugan is a game designer with aspirations to middle-weight baboon status. 


Image from Mykl Roventine via Creative Commons

The Future of Video Game Design

Video game designers have an almost pathological distaste for "suits", those nefarious types which worry about the nasty details of how to run a business and how to make money. But the role of game designer is changing - and designers better get comfortable with Armani and Brooks Brothers.

For those of you who haven't been paying attention, the game industry is in a seismic shift. Now, there's a tendency to say that every few years. But believe it or not, this time it's for realsies. Promise. 

It's because of a confluence of factors. For one thing, the console business as it used to be is done, finished, finito. The economics of developing for a console platform are rapidly becoming untenable. Game budgets roughly tripled since the last generation of hardware. And believe me, the install base of users did not match pace. There simply will not be a next generation of consoles unless somebody figures out how to make money on them. 

Which is where online comes into play. DLC and virtual goods and all that cool stuff that the interwebs makes possible. It all boils down to making incremental revenue by pushing digital content. 

The rise of social gaming also plays into this mess. Quite simply, "gaming" is shifting into the mainstream. And guess what, its not going to be pretty for a lot of people. In a very basic way, gaming has been a rarified field. It's been a small segment of the population making games for themselves. All you have to do is consider the difference in reach between getting 15 million people to play Modern Warfare 2 - and getting 80 million to play Farmville every month. 

But there's a downside to the world of the mainstream. Besides the fact that many designers are not looking forward to crafting games for Mr. and Mrs Middle America, it is fundamentally more challenging to make a viable business of it. It's not that money can't be made - simply that its far more complicated. It used to be you just made a game and sold a number of copies of it. X units times Y price equals Money. Now, there's numerous overlapping revenue sources from virtual goods to ads to referrals to upsells. 

So whether you are trying to keep your console and PC business alive or venturing into the bold world of mainstream social gaming, your business is extraordinarily sensitive to manipulation through the game mechanics. 

To put it another way, game design will be the difference between a viable business and moving back into Mom and Dad's basement.

Game designers are going to be driving the video game business. It will be through design decisions that new business opportunities will be created and exploited. The measurement of success for a game designer will be coldly objective and often brutal. Ubiquitous online connectivity means all designs will be mercilessly vetted. If your customers like the new digital widget you're pushing or find they can't help but come back every day to play your game, you will succeed. But if you fail to connect with your customer.... 

Game designers will need not only mastery of DPS balancing and leveling curves but also revenue models and ARPU and cost to acquire users. Game design is going to be a bold world that combines game mechanic theory, human psychology and business savvy. 

The game designer of future will look in the mirror - and find someone in a suit starting back at them.

- Sean Dugan is a designer who figures if you have to wear a suit, it might as well be a tuxedo.

Before You Work for a Start-up Game Company, Part II

So, you're about to take the plunge and work for a start-up video game company?

You've been asking the right questions - you know the executives are sharp (or at least didn't manage a hedge fund previously) and the team that's assembled looks like they can ship a product. What else do you need to ask before you take the plunge and jump on board the start-up?

Who doesn't work there?

Almost as important as who works there is who doesn’t work there anyway. If you can, you’ll want to check the people who have left a company. Check your network specifically for those who have left the company. Often, it’s more telling than who is still at the company.

That’s not to say a few departures are a disaster – in fact, its probably a good sign. It takes a while for a start-up to work out the kinks and get its culture to gel. Those that don’t quite fit in, right or wrong, end up leaving. Start-ups are inherently volatile, so a bit of churn is to be expected. That’s often a painful process but it’s not necessarily a bad sign for the company’s future. The question when considering departures is one of scale. Unless you are living in Egypt under a Pharoh, mass exoduses are generally not a positive sign. If people are leaving in droves, it’s in your interest to find out why.

What about the money?

Finally, you need to understand the company's bottom line. How much money has the company raised? Is this money that's actually in the bank or is it just promised? Where did the money come from and how likely are you to get any more? You need to consider the company’s ambitions in comparison to its means. As a wise philosopher once said, don’t let your mouth write a check that your butt can’t cash. If the company is trying to make a Halo-killer, do they have $25 million available to them?

Scratch the surface and all too often, "we've raised $25 million" actually means the company has a half million in Angel investment seed money and a 'cross my heart and hope to die' promise for the rest – spread out over the next three years. Maybe, if everything goes well and economy doesn’t tank and I don’t come across a better investment. The thing about promises - until the money is actually in the bank, they're worth exactly what you think they are. 

Even if there's a big check in the bank, you want to know if that's all the money. How much of the promised $25 million is in the bank today? When does the rest come? Typically, investments are divided into tranches (or slices) that are awarded at certain times. And there's usually a few strings attached to getting each new payment. If you want to be a real boy, Pinocchio, better understand how to get free of your strings. 

You also need to know how much money has been spent. Ask what the company's current burn rate is - that gives you a timeline until disaster or the necessary next round of funding. This is the lifespan of the company – and you need to know if it’s a fruit fly or a sea turtle.

And speaking of new funding - can you get more money? Every company needs rainmakers. Can you get more money from the publishers or VCs or whoever? Or will you all be asked Aunt Violet to put up her IRA to keep the company afloat? With your rainmakers, there's also a fine art to identifying which ones are the real deal and which are hot air. The best advice there - ask around and find out what deals they actually closed. Again, money in the bank is the only thing that matters at the end of the day. 

All this advice comes with a huge caveat. Almost guaranteed, you’ll find something you don’t like with any start-up you would consider. The nature of start-ups is that they’re funky and imperfect. If you want low risk, go to work for...well, frankly, another industry. Video game development is volatile and start-ups are doubly so.

Really, it’s the start-up that seems absolutely perfect and too-good-to-be-true that should be handled like an Ebola infected radioactive kitty litter box. I remember interviewing during the height of the dot-com boom with a company that was ‘perfect’ – it had the founder pedigree, the VC funding, the splashy cover stories on all the right magazines. But something seemed amiss when everybody I  interviewed with asked the same question - could I figure out how the company was supposed to make money? It struck me that the business should probably have some inkling already as to how to generate a bit of cash. Fast forward and you can guess that company’s eventual fate.

Working for a start-up can be the adventure of a lifetime. The excitement of working for a young, aggressive company that wants to change the world is undeniable. But if you want to keep your heart from getting broken, be sure to go in with your eyes wide open.


Image via Wikipedia Commons

Before You Work for a Start-up Game Company, Part I

It's the opportunity of a lifetime, your chance to be the next big thing, to seize the brass ring. 

You have a chance to work for a cool, new start-up game company. A year later, the company has missed four paychecks, you're working 80 hour weeks and the CEO has caught the redeye to Aruba.

Taking a new job at a new company is always a bit transition. Despite everything, there's inevitably a few surprises along the way. But when the new company you are working for is a start-up game company, the surprises can come fast and furious.

How do you keep your start-up game company dreams from becoming a nightmare? You have to approach this the same way a savvy investor would. Investors (that don't lose their shirts) require due diligence before putting up the money.

First, we'll define a start up as a company that doesn't have a revenue stream (or one steady enough to have any shot of keeping the company afloat). That means, whatever war chest the company has is steadily being drained until somebody figures out how to bring in some cash. Fundamentally, this means that you are on a countdown with a start-up - the only question is whether its a countdown to blast off or detonation.

If you are going to have any shot of being a part of one and not the other, there's some big questions to ask:

Who are the executives?
You know all those names on the website? The one's that have impressive C-level titles? You want to find out who these people are. Game developers often have an allergy to business and "suits" - but you need to understand who the suits in the corner office are. If you don't want to worry your pretty little head about the business, you better make sure damn sure the execs know the ins and outs.

Google their name and the name of their last company. Find out what happened to that company. Was it sold successfully? Did it go bankrupt? Was there an investor lawsuit? An SEC investigation? These are shockingly more plausible than you might realize.

Also, look at the business that they used to manage. If you're a World Wildlife Fund member, you might have some moral qualms of working for the former CEO of Seal Pelts, Inc. There are a lot of businesses that exist in a moral gray area for some people so you need to ask yourself if you can work with these people. How do you feel about tying your fate to an Enron or Goldman Saches executive? On a more basic level, how much game industry experience do they have? Much of business is universal - but a C-level exec who has never worked in a creative industry is almost certain to butt heads with those creative types during the production process.

Who is the team?
These are the line managers and co-workers, the people who are going to be your immediate boss and make the ship go. You want to know who they are. Ideally, you've already worked with them - and that's why you're even considering working for the company. Going blind into a start-up without any history with its peeps is a risky roll of the dice.

But even if you do know the team, you need to ask yourself the hard question - are these the people you want to be at a start-up with? We all know game developers who, frankly, fit in better in a big company than a lean and aggressive start-up. Picking a start-up team is a little like getting a roommate - that buddy from school who's great to hang out with on a Friday might not be the guy you want to share cleaning chores with on a Sunday.

And if you don't know the team first hand, find out. Figure out who you know in common - and ask them tough questions. You've got to find a source who will give you the straight scoop. And if you want my opinion, Linkedin recommendations are next to worthless. Yes, I have recommendations and I've recommended people. And the folks I've recommended are the people I genuinely believe in. But Linkedin is a game - people use social obligation to get softball recommendations. I've seen too many people who literally had dozens and dozens of recommendations who turned out to be incompetent. For me, too many recommendations is a warning sign as well as ones which have a certain bland, generic quality. If someone isn't motivated enough to write a stirring recommendation, it's probably not a real recommendation.

Also, you want to know what products they've shipped. The quality of those games is not the most important thing - there are far too many variables there - but you want to know that these people have been through the wars. Moby Games is a nice start - but its always incomplete. Credits are a dicey issue in this industry and someone's published credits doesn't always reflect their actual work experience. Again, the best source is someone you trust who worked on the project.

Check out Part II for more on Start-ups.


Image via Wikipedia Commons

Video Game Design By the Numbers, Part I

Inspiration is tough to pin down and when the Muse visits, she does not appreciate you demanding her exact height, weight and brassiere size.

Video game design and development is a frequently a profession of gut instincts and hunches. Artistry and creativity come from a deep and mysterious place that's maddeningly hard to quantify much less predict. When your business is "fun", some of your standards are rather subjective. Various people will describe running 26.2 miles, wading hip deep in a bog or grinding Molten Core for the ten-thousandth time as "fun".

Clearly, standards of fun differ.

But one of the biggest failures of many game designers is not fortifying their personal instincts and opinions with a few cold, hard numbers.

Let's boil it down to brass tacks. Video game design and development is a commercial art. All of our grand theories about the nature of fun and flow and optimal experience and blah blah blah must be in the end be sullied by talk of the almighty dollar. Eventually, we all must descend from the Ivory Tower and roll around in the mud with the dirty old swine of Commerce.

In other words, as a video game developer, your career prospects will be greatly enhanced if your game sells.

It's is all fine and well to be driven by your artistic and creative impulses and the quest for fun and The Awesome when you create a game. In fact, that's a prerequisite for being any good as a game designer. But you also need to temper your enthusiasm with a bit of objective reality.

Asking a junior designer "what did you think of [FILL IN THE BLANK]?" and you'll hear about how they lost the entire weekend to playing [FILL IN THE BLANK]. And that's exactly the kind of passion you want in a young game designer.

The thing to add is an understanding of what other people thought of the game. Their opinion matters too.

Really, there are two key questions to ask about a game (in addition to your own opinion).

What's the meta-critic rating?
There is more than one aggregator of game reviews out there and none are perfect. First, there's a lot of subjective evaluation in game reviews. And to say the state of game journalism it uneven at best is an understatement. Even if you assume the reviews are honest and genuine, there's a subjective evaluation in translating a review into a score. But it's really the best tool we have for evaluating the quality of a game. Look at the top meta-critic games and you'll see what most people would call "good games". More and more, publishers and game developers use meta-critic scores as a means of arguing quality even if sales are not overwhelming. "Maybe we only sold a million units - but our meta-critic was through the roof".

The other trick with meta-critic is evaluating the meaning of the score. There isn't much difference between a game in the low 70's and the high 70's - but an 82 metacritic score is a lot different than an 89. Getting a feeling for the plateaus of the scores is crucial to using metacritic (and yes, it's awfully subjective too).

But the other big question to ask is pretty obvious:

What are the unit sales?
Rather than relying on gut feelings about whether something 'did well', you need to get some real numbers. It's vital to understand how the marketplace responded to a product. NPD tracks game sales and you should be following the monthly charts religiously. You should understand what moving 250,000 units in a week means given whether that was the launch week, what were the pre-sales, what is the install base of the platform and how big of a marketing effort there was.  There is a huge difference in sales between an modest title developed by a new studio on a modest platform compared to a license tie-in backed by a powerhouse publisher with a gazillion marketing dollars.

Does this mean game design should be driven by purely mechanical evaluation of sales potential? Absolutely not. You'll never see a breakout hit unless you truly have a product with a soul. Innovation and true creativity drive new markets in the game industry. But you also need to understand the temperament of the market. Before you pitch your Japanese Cowboy Mech game, you might want to have a sense of how previous titles have fared.

But how do you actually judge is a title is a "hit"? What is it that separates a title that turns a tidy profit from a title that puts a studio out of business? That's a question that can only be answered by examining the economics of game production, which will be Part II of this series.

- Sean Dugan's number is up with this entry. 

Image by Ira R Gerich used via Creative Commons License

The Big Three Questions of Starting a Game Company

"Let's go start a video game company". And with those words, the dreams of innumerable game developers were ground into a thin tar-like paste.

It's not that starting a game company is impossible. Far from it - in this age of iPhone apps and social games, it's well within the reach of a lot of game developers. But that's not what most developers mean when they say they want to start a game company. They want to make a $20 million AAA console title or launch a $40 million MMO.

And to do either of those, you'll need more money than you've got stashed in your 401K.

Facebook demands a piece of the Social Gaming action

Social game developers have been getting a free viral marketing ride on the Facebook gravy train - but this ride is about to come to a grinding halt.

Alongside the explosive growth of Facebook has come the amazing rise of social or viral gaming - a billion dollar virtual market of black sheep and mob gombas. People are crazy to spend a dollar here and there to acquire cute dresses or the right to play for just a few more minutes, something that's been pretty obvious in Asia for a while now. But there's been a looming cloud on the social gaming horizon - what happens when Facebook requires all the social games to use it's currency system for purchasing virtual goods?

Now it's being reported that Facebook's virtual currency system is imminent. "Imminent" in the sense that if this was your pregnant wife, you'd be barreling through red lights as she screams in your ear that if you tell her to breath one more time, she's giving you a vasectomy with a spork.

So all the social game designers are girding their loins in preparation for the bad news - and it's grim indeed. According to the reports, FB is taking a 30% piece of the action.

Tony Soprano would be proud. Or Steve Jobs, for that matter.

Clearly, the iPhone App Store is the model being watched closely. Since the iPhone debuted, developers have been complaining - quite loudly - about the 30% license fee Apple charges. That hefty slice of revenue greatly cuts into the profit margin of any small - or large for that matter - game developer who thinks they've got the baddest iPhone app in the room. It's the kind of fee that can strangle developers and shut them out of the market. To hear the naysayers, a percentage that large dooms the iPhone store to oblivion.

At last count, there just under 400 bazillion iPhone apps available.

So apparently the market has spoken on the viability of 30%.

What it highlights is the simple power of being in complete control of a platform with no significant competitors. In the console world, there's at least a semblance of competition between Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo.

But looking at the social games on Facebook - what options does a game designer really have? Even the mighty Zynga is beholden to the platform Facebook provides. Zynga is trying to test the waters with Farmville.com to see if they can ditch Facebook someday. But the initial results are sobering. 74 million users on Facebook versus 250,000 on their website.

For all intents and purposes, developers of social games are dependent on Facebook. When faced with the option of either migrating to something like MySpace - which is in decline (which is as good as dead in the business world) - or trying to build your own web presence and drive traffic to it, most developers will grumble and complain - and in the end, pay Facebook it's piece of the action.

So for the social gaming world, it's time to send big Marko his piece of the action. But cheer up, at least he's not breaking legs - yet.

- Sean Dugan really hopes he doesn't wake up with the head of Marc Pincus in his bed. 

Image by Alberto P. Viega under Creative Commons License

Electronic Arts: At what price innovation?

Gamers tend to loudly demand better and more innovative video games. They throw down the guantlet for the industry - give us better quality video games. In recent years, industry giant Electronic Arts has responded to the challenge and picked up the guantlet - and it's about to cost the CEO his job.

Our story starts when exec John Riccitiello left Electronic Arts to form a game VC firm with Bono (yes, really). Then, he merged BioWare and Pandemic, got that company bought by EA and returned to head the whole she-bang. Since returning to EA, he’s been banging the drum of developing new IP. This is a concept the company paid lip service to for years – and then continued to churn out dubious licensed games.

And then, strangely, Riccitiello actually started doing something about it.

Army of Two, Mirror’s Edge, Deadspace, Dragon Age – these are all original IP that have various degrees of innovation. They may not be Bioshock or Assassin's Creed II but they're better than a lot of EA offerings. He’s rightly observed that licensed intellectual property doesn't build new businesses – to do that, a company needs to invest in new IP.

And the response from Wall Street? To hammer the company.

EA's stock value has dropped more than 70% since he took over. (And yes, I still retain some stock from tenure there - sadly!) The company’s games may get better metacritic scores – but they aren’t selling as well. Now, the economy plays a role in this. But there’s considerable pressure to just going back to sloughing second-rate Madden, Harry Potter and movie tie-in games onto the shelves. And to further complicate the situation, there’s fundamental changes happening in gaming landscape. Console development is plagued by skyrocketing budgets while attachment rates drop and online redefines the gaming space (whether it’s Zynga style games or massive multiplayer efforts like WoW). The company has made moves to adapt to these realities – but not fast enough in the opinion of many.

So now, it's a horse race to see whether EA has a break-out new IP smash - or Riccitiello is ousted and the company goes back to unremarkable shovelware.