EA’s John Riccitiello made a recent statement that should really send a shiver across the company: "EA will kill a game or two a year. Forever."

He continues: "This is a perfect example of EA investing in quality. When something’s not meeting expectations… you can course correct by giving it more time, more money, changing the concept or killing the game. If you’re committed to quality, you take one of those paths. If you preclude any one of those paths, quality will suffer."

Further down the road, Riccitiello get back on the high quality issue, just to make sure that EA is very concerned about making the best games possible:

"If you want to put good food on the table and you’ve got chefs in the back, you give them better ingredients, better training — and when you burn the omelet, you don’t serve it."

The cancellation of Tiberium surely gave EA a black eye in terms of image. Famous franchise, great expectations, it’s no rocket science to guess that at least some people are beginning to doubt EA’s capacity to handle its empire. So Riccitiello had to step forward and perform the corporate damage control ritual.