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EA - Wii Caught Us By Surprise
A Next Generation story details comments by EA's CEO John Riccitiello about the surprise hit that is the Wii. The exec as much as admitted that they 'bet on the wrong horse' by focusing on the PS3 and 360 during the console transistion, and now are turning the mighty corporate ship as fast as they can to stay with Nintendo's success. "Nevertheless, Riccetello said that EA had the second-largest market share on Wii as of March with 19 percent, thanks mainly to Tiger Woods PGA Tour. Only Nintendo had a larger share. The firm shipped six new Wii titles in fiscal 2007. EA also shipped eight titles on Nintendo DS. The emergence of online, wireless and geographical differences in the console realm also made things complicated in fiscal '07."
In a way, this could be a really good thing for Wii that EA missed the boat to a degree. Without the EA juggernaut from day 1, it may have left enough room for younger, more innovative companies to get a solid foot in the door. That little moment of bad judgment may well reverberate through the lifespan of the console, and I can't say I expect it to be in a bad way.
(...oh, and...first?)
Unpleasantries.
Just proves how far detached big game companies are from their userbase and how little do they understand entertainment.
Considering the hype surrounding the PS3 and 360, it wasn't really stupid to back them or anything at the start. But the price annoucement changed everything, and they should have noticed that immediately. Instead, EA made the same mistake in judging the market that Sony did when they thought "well, PS2 dominated the market while pricier than the GCN, so at that rate people will gladly pay 2x as much for 100x the hardware." What they SHOULD have noticed is that people on the whole clearly don't care nearly as much about graphical firepower as other things, and the PS2 made that crystal clear!
EA had the luxury of changing teams while Sony had to figure out how to stick with theirs, and so far the haven't been able to do so.
I like basketball!!1!
Let's have a show of hands here. How many people, prior to E3 2006, actually thought that Nintendo would be able to reverse their fortunes so spectacularly? How many times did everyone hear people talking about "PS2 and XBox" or "Sony and Microsoft" when talking about the new generation of consoles? It was clear that Nintendo was going for broke when they unveiled their control scheme, but I think it was simply impossible at that point to foresee a turnabout of this magnitude. Considering how risk averse developers are these days, it's hardly surprising that many of them elected to overlook the Wii in the beginning.
Well, I think the problem with Madden last year was that the Wii was just released for the holiday season, whereas Madden traditionally gets released in August or so (just before the start of the season). So I guess a lot of people who needed their Madden fix already had the game for a different platform and did not want to shell out money again for the Wii version (what is also a problem is that Madden on the Wii (AFAIK) does not have an online roster update function yet, so it came late to the party and is not even upgradable.
Lets see how Madden fares this year on the Wii. I think it will do very well, since last years version showed that the controls work surprisingly well and are a lot of fun (as you mentioned yourself) and this year the Wii version should be out simultaneously to the other platforms.
I'm trying really hard to think of a studio that accurately predicted the Wii's success and oriented themselves accordingly, it wasn't just EA. Proof of this is that after all this time after the launch there are still very few truly stellar games for the system apart from Nintendo's titles.
Instead they're all running around in a panic and screaming: "Titles for the Wii are coming, don't worry!". The problem is that this is a re-deployment of resources brought upon by the unexpected market share of a system, instead of that system's uniques features. Or in other words, it was a bean counter along the corporate hierarchy who said "Holy cow, this is thing is selling like hot cakes, we need games out NOW" instead of some developer taking a look at the cool new control system and saying "You know, I could really do something amazing with this" and proceeding to annoy bean counters to realize his idea.
The end result is that this first flood of titles is crap, taking very little advantage of the Wii's control system. Things will get worse before they get better, as was the case with the DS's early life cycle.
Can someone tell where my NHL 2008 on the Wii is? The controlling scheme would be so simple - Use the analog stick on the nunchuck to move, like every other NHL game. Configure the game so it knows whether you are left or right handed. Hold the wiimote and nunchuck in parallel, as if you were holding a hockey stick. Move the hockey stick around to stick handle. To help the Wii system understand what you're trying to do with the puck, hold down B to shoot and Z to pass. A quick flick of the wrists for a wrister, and a windup for a slapshot. It seems so obvious to me that this would be a killer game on the Wii. I almost want to get my hands on the Wii developer kit just so I can build a prototype of the controlling scheme to get EA Sports on the right track.
Right now, I'm stuck playing Nintendo Ice Hockey (circa 1988), and it just isn't cutting it. I've considered ponying up a few dollars for a couple Gamecube controllers and NHL 2006, but I can't say I'm that excited about the idea, since I already have NHL 07 on the PC.