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."

Comments

Good Thing?

[Odin_Tiger]

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?)

Surely it did

[ceeam]

Just proves how far detached big game companies are from their userbase and how little do they understand entertainment.

Re:Surely it did

[Lockejaw]

EA -- releases the same games year after year, with some updates
Wii -- completely new control system, so something of a new way to game

Yeah, sounds like EA is a bit of a mismatch, eh?

Re:Surely it did

[gstoddart]

Just proves how far detached big game companies are from their userbase and how little do they understand entertainment.

Well, the thing about new and disruptive technologies, is nobody really sees them coming.

For years, they've been on the march of "better graphics, more of the same kind of game play" that they haven't been able to look outside of that scope and foresee the effects of the Wii.

All of a sudden someone comes along, says "graphics aren't the whole point, and, hey, look at this new controller". The rules change. A lot of people who weren't into games (or losing interest, or whatever) stand up and decide that is exactly what they've been looking for, and where do I get one. It's only once it's become wildly popular and something you can't ignore, that you have to re-evaluate what you thought.

In fairness, I don't think anyone saw the Wii coming or could have planned on the fact that simpler game play, with less intense graphics, that actually involved moving around would have captivated so many people. You're probably right to an extent, but from their position, EA would have looked at the Wii and said "Well, I don't see that being a big deal". Now they're finding out they were horribly wrong.

Me, I still can't get over how much fun the Wii Sports which came with my Wii is -- I mean, bowling of all things? Who knew? These are exactly the kind of games I've wanted -- only I didn't know it, I just knew I couldn't play/stand most games anymore.

Cheers

Re:Surely it did

[jratcliffe]

To be fair, it appears that the Wii success caught Nintendo off guard as well - while a designed shortage in the first couple of months to drum up attention might have been a good idea, it's very hard to believe that the current lack of availability is something that Nintendo planned, rather than a result of sales having outstripped Nintendo's forecasts (and hence manufacturing capability).

Understandable

[Sciros]

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.

Everyone was blindsided

[Graftweed]

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.