Richard Hilleman – was that meant to be a compliment towards Steve Jobs?

The chief creative officer of EA has launched a personal attack against Shigeru Miyamoto, as he claims games are too complicated and time consuming.

We’ve heard execs say some stupid things in our time, especially in the last few months, but a recent speech by EA’s Richard Hilleman seems specially designed to offend just about everyone.

He was speaking at the D.I.C.E. Europe event in London, where, according to website GamesIndustry International, he suggested that where previously younger gamers had cut their gaming teeth on games designed by Nintendo’s Miyamoto now they were learning everything from iOS games.



Which seems a perfectly reasonable point to make, even if it is a bit odd to single out Miyamoto specifically, but this is how he got his point across:


‘I thank Miyamoto for that,’ he said. ‘But he’s falling down on the job. And for the past five years that job has been taken over by a dead guy from Cupertino.’

The latter is a reference to a certain Steve Jobs, since Cupertino in California is where Apple’s HQ is based. Although it completely ignores the fact that not only does Apple not make games and has almost no direct influence on the industry – it merely provides a platform for it to work on – but Jobs himself personally disliked video games.

Hilleman then followed up the rudest comment we’ve ever heard from an exec with the most depressing, as he implied that video games up till now have required too much skill and effort to play.

‘We’ve asked for too much time, too much skill, and too much money, sometimes all at once,” he said. ‘Customers today… are generally looking for a single fabric of play. They want their game where they want it, when they want it, and at a price they can defend to other people.’

His wider point was that user-created content would become key in the next generation, saying of players that create their own mods and artwork: ‘Maybe these guys are the new software artists, and that means they will be the key strategic resource for the future… and they know it.’

He then suggested that these gamers would become more important than in-house staff, which we’re sure must have pleased all the thousands of developers working at EA’s various studios.

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