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Nintendo has been told that it must sell more Wii U’s if it wishes to win back the affections of third party publisher EA.
That’s the verdict of EA Labels president Frank Gibeau, who told Joystiq that money is of course the ultimate deciding facts. And Wii U’s numbers don’t currently add up.
"The only thing they can do to fix it is to sell more boxes,” he stated. We’re a rational company, we go where the audience is. We publish games where we think we can make a great game and hit a big audience, and make money. That’s why we’re here, that’s why we have an industry.
"We shipped four games [for the Wii U]. We shipped Madden, FIFA, Need for Speed and Mass Effect. In fact, the last Need for Speed shipped 60 days ago had a pretty good Metacritic. It was a good game. It wasn’t a schlocky port, we actually put extra effort into getting everything to work. And it’s just not selling because there’s no boxes."
It seems to be a message Nintendo has heard loud and clear.
"EA is a great partner of ours, they’ve had games on our platforms before,” Nintendo of America’s head of corporate communications Charlie Scibetta stated. They want what all third parties want and what we want: for the install base to grow.
We’re confident that once some of these games come out that we have planned between now and the holiday and into 2014, that it will help drive the install base and when that happens the platforms will look more enticing to third parties."
