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EA Forms Wii-Centric Studio
Despite analyst assurances that there would no longer be many console exclusives, EA is forming an entire studio for Wii titles. Larry Probst revealed this tidbit in a very interesting interview with Newsweek's N'Gai Croal. They've since acquired Headgate studios, rebranding it EA Salt Lake. From the article: "I don't think the Wii is going to be any different than all the other Nintendo platforms. Nintendo is going to have a very significant market share, and all the third party companies are going to have market shares that are single-digit or low double-digits. We think that we can be very competitive in that environment. We don't have any expectations that we're going to have a 30 percent market share, as we have had on Xbox 360, on PlayStation 2, or what we're targeting on PlayStation 3. But I think we can have a meaningful market share on the Wii platform, and be in the number two position behind Nintendo."
In the long run I expect to see the Wii (if it is popular enough) to be handled by developers in a very similar way to how handhelds have traditional been dealt with. In almost every major third party release for the home console a handheld version was made at the same time because of how much less expensive it was to develop and the size of the userbase for the handheld system. It is possible that you could see Final Fantasy, Metal Gear or GTA (or whatever) being released at the same time for the Wii and other platforms but the Wii version could be drastically different.
EA has a million little studios all over the world. Even if you already know that EA is a big company, the number of little studios the company continuously is buying or setting up is staggering. So this is a pretty meaningless 'development'. It is pretty much the equivalent of a smaller company hiring or making one employee their 'Wii guy'.
There has been some friction inside EA with the Wii, most people want to focus on the PS3 and think the Wii is a distraction. So letting a small group focus on Wii specific stuff is a good option and lets the people at RS and the other main campuses focus on their PS3 titles.
Concidering most talk of the Wii as if its just a glorified gamecube, isnt it rather odd that the company that was most vocal about offering minimal gamecube support now wants to be #2 behind Nintendo on the console.
So far I am overwhelmed by the support announced for the Wii, I would not be surprised at the is point to see square even meander back to its original home with more support. It may not win the consumer side of the console wars (I actually think it will) but its clearly won the hearts and minds of developers. Perhaps the original name "Revolution" should have been kept because its certainly introducted an expected spark of creativity and love for platform that most developers thought of as near death.
Ubisoft wants to be number 2 globally, which is for the Wii, PS3, Xbox360 and PC combined. In that combined market, EA is first. However, on the Wii (or GameCube, or NDS, or GBA, or just any console made by Nintendo), Nintendo is by far and beyond the first developer, and I truly doubt anybody will ever catch up to them. Even EA can't make something as successful as Zelda, Squeenix either.
Even if there is extensive 3rd party support for the Wii, 4 Nintendo franchises will sell more than 50% of all software : Mario, Zelda, Metroid and Pokemon. Final Fantasy and Madden can't even dream to get that big a market share.
After 3 days without programming, life becomes meaningless
- The Tao of Programming
Yes, Wii Sports is the pinnacle of the graphical power of Nvidia's chipset technology. After making the GPU that powered games like Resident Evil for GameCube they sat down to create a GPU more powerful and that could handle rendering Fisher-Price lookalike balloon-headed guys with almost no textures. I think its safe to say we'll not see a game with better graphics than the free pack-in multi-game title Wii Sports on this console.