EA Casual: reviews don’t matter to casual gamers

Reviews don’t matter much to casual gamers, says EA Casual president Kathy Vrabeck. Thus, she’s not worried if Electronic Arts titles aimed for casuals get low ratings, knowing people will still buy them. More on Vrabeck’s thoughts at the full article!

EA Casual, Electronic Arts‘ arm in charge of developing casual games such as EA Playground and Boogie, is not known for topping charts with high rated games. Head honcho Kathy Vrabeck even says she’s getting less concerned about video game reviews because the target audience of casual games “don’t read any of those things.”

According to website Next Generation, Vrabeck shrugs off low scores from review sites off when the ratings are for casual games. “It’s a little bit amusing, in that it’s people reviewing games against measures that are important to core gamers yet are not important to casual gamers,” she said.

Russel Arons, EA Casual vice president of marketing, has a different way to measure how good a game is. “…The measurement [of a gameÂ’s appeal] for women aged 25 to 34 would more likely be whether or not theyÂ’d hang up on their girlfriend to play this game,” he stated.

Vrabeck admitted, however, that getting reviews for casual games is “a huge issue in the press and in the industry.” She’s all for EA finding ways to make sure people know about what critics think about their offerings, whether good or bad. “Metacritic scores or the GameRankings scores are just off-base,” she added.