Andrew Wilson
Andrew Wilson

After John Riccitiello stepped down in March, gaming giant Electronic Arts has been on the hunt for a new top exec.

Now, EA, which owns Seattle’s PopCap Games, has announced they have finally found Riccitiello’s successor. Andrew Wilson, who served most recently as the Executive Vice President overseeing the company’s EA Sports brand and its Origin digital distribution platform, was named the company’s CEO today. Larry Probst, who served as interim CEO while the company conducted its search, said that he would be staying on indefinitely as the company’s Executive Chairman in a blog post announcing the change.

For his part, Wilson seems optimistic about EA’s chances, and his introductory post to the company’s official blog said that he plans to stay the course that the company has already charted.

“We have made strong progress in the first half of the fiscal year, establishing financial discipline and continuing to create a slate of fantastic games for current and next-generation consoles, mobile and PC. But now we’ve got to finish the job – execute in Q3 and Q4 and deliver on the promises we made to our fans and our shareholders,” Wilson said in the post.

Wilson isn’t out of the woods yet, though. EA has banked quite a bit on its Origin distribution platform, which gamers seem to have begrudgingly adopted as the cost of doing business with EA. It’s clear that the company wants Origin to become a service similar to Valve’s Steam platform, but EA doesn’t seem to have made much progress on that front. The company has also been hurt by the poor performance of the latest SimCity game, which was plagued with problems at its launch both on the PC and more recently on the Mac OS.

 

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