John Riccitiello, CEO of Electronic Arts, has set his sights on toppling the Activision commercial behemoth that is Call of Duty in the not-too-distant-future, believing that "over time we can take the lead."
Chatting with Kotaku, Riccitiello said the solution to dethroning the ubiquitous first-person shooter franchise is to: “Make a better game, and make a better game again."
“The way you unseat a market leader is you make a better game a couple of times in a row,” he continued. “If I had to pick the story I’d like to play out [is] next year is we ship a 90 and they ship an 85 [Metacritic]. Activision has] an awful lot of momentum without their brand, no doubt. What I’ve witnessed a couple of times in the games industry is the way you unseat a market leader is you make a better game a couple of times in a row. ”
The executive also let slip that EA’s market share in the FPS genre has increased substantially on the back of Battlefield: Bad Company 2 – and Riccitiello’s confident that next year’s Battlefield 3 will prove an even bigger hit.
"I think it’s interesting that Battlefield Bad Company 2 got the same Metacritic score (both are 88- ed) as Black Ops,” he said. “We knew we were building on [the] Unreal [graphics technology] for Medal of Honor which wasn’t our foot-forward tact. We knew that going in. Our next game [Battlefield 3] is being built on the second generation of Frostbite which I think is at least in my opinion is a class act for FPS. I think we’re going to lift the game pretty dramatically in the first-person shooter category.”
“I have great expectations to do a lot better in 2011 than in 2010 on the strength of a couple of products like Bulletstorm and Crysis [2], but most importantly for us, Battlefield 3, which I feel incredibly good about.”
Do you think EA has what it takes to dethrone Call of Duty, PSU readers? Let us know in the comments section below.