EA Has No Games in Development For Nintendo's Wii U
Less than two years after vowing to deliver on an “unprecedented partnership” with Nintendo, gaming giant EA is quiet on the Wii U front. “We have no games in development for the Wii U currently,” company spokesperson Jeff Brown told Kotaku yesterday.
Context & Ripple Effects
Nintendo entered 2013 pointing to steady year-end Wii U sales in its year-end sales update, but its April results included a second consecutive annual operating loss and an acknowledgement that the console had not generated expected consumer excitement. EA's statement turns the earlier partnership rhetoric into a concrete gap in the platform's software support.
The disclosure also arrives during EA's roughly 900-person restructuring, giving the publisher a clear incentive to concentrate development resources on platforms and projects it judges most commercially viable.
First-order effects
- Nintendo loses EA's near-term Wii U release pipeline, leaving the platform more dependent on Nintendo and other publishers to supply recognizable games.
- EA can direct Wii U development resources elsewhere while it manages its broader workforce restructuring.
Second-order effects
- Nintendo's effort to persuade buyers that Wii U has sustained third-party support becomes harder when a major publisher has no active projects for the system.
- Other publishers gain more leverage in negotiations over Wii U releases because Nintendo has fewer large-publisher commitments to point to.
Third-order effects
- If major publishers allocate development according to each platform's expected return, weak early software support and weak buyer demand can reinforce one another, raising the opportunity cost of platform-exclusive investment.
The trend: Console makers are increasingly judged not just by hardware sales but by whether their installed base can sustain ongoing third-party development investment.