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EA, analysts talk Wii U situation - Wii U needs to sell more, EA may come back, power is an issue

by rawmeatcowboy
26 June 2013
GN Version 4.0
The following blurbs come from a Eurogamer feature.

"My guess is that EA saw poor share on the Wii and Nintendo promised to help it gain greater share on the Wii U, and EA hadn't seen enough progress to give it confidence that it should continue support. Add to that the fact that EA missed its financial targets last year, and went through a comprehensive review of spending that didn't generate a return. It is highly likely that in this review, it determined that it was not profitable on incremental R&D spending for Wii U, and it couldn't see the poor-selling console turning the corner in the next year or two.

My bet is that once Wii U gets a respectable installed base (say 15-20 million units), EA will look at supporting it again, as it might be able to sell sufficient units of its big games to turn a profit. It is unlikely that FIFA on Wii U would penetrate many more than 10 per cent of the installed base, and it might not justify the incremental cost to make the game for only 500,000 units sold." - Michael Pachter
"When you run a business - and we all run businesses - you have to make decisions that are good for the consumers, and the people who work inside this company and good for our shareholders. We put our eggs in the basket where we think they'll matter the most. I understand some people will be disappointed by that. Our job as game creators and executives is to be where the gamers are. Frankly, it's as simple as that." - Patrick Soderlund, boss of EA Games Labels
“Listen, I think we built a really solid game (FIFA). We were very happy with the game. We did the best to take advantage of the capabilities and the features of the Nintendo Wii U. Fun is a subjective thing. But what I can say is we put everything we could into making that the best possible game with the tools we had at hand.

Nintendo's a fantastic partner to us. We've had a long relationship with them. We certainly never count them out. I know they are working diligently to grow their install base and grow their install base of sports gamers, which by default will grow their install base of FIFA gamers. And as that happens we may be given cause to re-evaluate where we go and what we focus on." - Andrew Wilson, boss of EA Sports
"If the Wii U was immensely popular we would probably put more focus into seeing how we could mitigate this, because it is a technical problem. It is a technical problem at its core because the Frostbite engine is not designed to run on that hardware, and the hardware is quite different from the next-gen consoles and the previous gen consoles.

From our perspective it's not as powerful as it should be to be able to run a Battlefield game. Straight out of the box, as in Frostbite 3, it doesn't run that well on the Wii U, which means it takes a lot of time and energy from us that would then take from something else.

So, we made the decision to say, no, let's not take away the focus from the PlayStations and the Xboxes and the PCs to do this. At the end of the day it's about focus and priorities. If we could press a button to move it over to Wii U, of course we could make a Wii U SKU, but it would take some substantial time to do it. I know some fans get very upset when we say that, but it's true. There's a reason why not all games are on the Wii U platform." - Patrick Bach, executive producer of Battlefield at DICE
"This is not just an EA issue. Most publishers will be looking for Nintendo to generate platform momentum before committing significant investment at this stage. We expect Wii U sales to pick up in line with the release of big hitting titles and increased marketing support. But overall we expect Nintendo to lose significant market share this generation compared to last gen. Nintendo's short term plan is to generate momentum through first party games and to then stimulate increased third party investment. This still means, however, that we are unlikely to see significant third party releases until the end of 2014." - Piers Harding-Rolls, senior analyst and games boss at UK-based IHS Screen Digest
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