EA Developing Wii U Games After All
Looks like a certain company needs to get its story straight. — Oh EA, just make up your mind already, would you? Last week brought us a slew of controversial comments from the company regarding Nintendo's newest home console, Wii U. First …
Context & Ripple Effects
Five days after Kotaku reported that EA had no games in development for the Wii U, IGN says the publisher is building Wii U titles after all — a reversal picked up by Polygon, The Verge and GamesIndustry International on the same day. The whiplash lands on top of a rough month for EA: a May 9 earnings call confirmed roughly 900 layoffs, about ten percent of staff, as part of a major restructuring.
The flip-flop also fits a longer EA pattern of contested platform stories — in 2011 the company dismissed a report that next-gen Xbox hardware was already at EA as a 'total fabrication' ([[a:1191197]]) — and echoes the 2007-era debate over third-party support on Nintendo hardware that Activision was drawn into back then.
First-order effects
- EA has to reconcile two contradictory public positions within one week, putting pressure on its communications team and its relationship with Nintendo, whose console's third-party lineup is already under scrutiny.
- Nintendo gains a same-day counter-narrative to the 'no EA support' story, useful alongside Reggie Fils-Aime's April pledge that the pace of Wii U releases will increase dramatically.
Second-order effects
- Other publishers weighing Wii U commitments will read EA's vacillation as a signal that third-party support on the console is being decided deal-by-deal rather than as standing policy, making their own announcements more conditional and hedged.
- Retailers and press coverage of the Wii U's software pipeline now hinge on which version of EA's position holds, since a single major publisher's stance disproportionately shapes perception of the console's library.
Third-order effects
- If publishers keep signaling support or abandonment through leaks and denials rather than formal commitments, platform-holder relationships become a public negotiation, with each side using the press to test terms.
- The episode reinforces the structural risk for any console that depends on third-party output: when one large publisher wavers, the whole third-party narrative around the platform moves with it, independent of how many smaller studios remain committed.
The trend: Third-party console support is shifting from stable publishing commitments to publicly negotiated, leak-driven positioning between publishers and platform holders.