Recently EA have spoken in secret about the Nintendo NX and their lack of plans to develop for it. They outlined a bunch of things that Nintendo is required to do in order to be blessed with EA’s fantastic library of quality games. To sum it up, they want Nintendo to “provide a market for sports games” by throwing millions of dollars on sports advertising. They just want a userbase that will buy sports games. Sound fair?
Let’s look at the BEST CASE SCENARIO where Nintendo releases an industry leading console, with the #1 selling game being a sports game. Let’s go CRAZY and assume this game is bundled with the system and becomes the highest selling game of all time. So here we have the perfect gaming console for EA to release sports games. This is what EA brings to the table.
FUCK. RIGHT. OFF.
I’m gonna flip this right around and give a narrative of EA’s meeting with Nintendo in March. They make their demands. They say all this shit. They make their big speech about how Nintendo needs to be “good enough” for EA and do their job for them.
Kimishima has not said a word this entire time, and has just sat patiently through a 30 minute EA presentation with dubstep music and people wearing backwards caps and sunglasses. He stares at every EA employee, one by one, shaking his head. “Where are the games?” he asks very calmly. EA employees all stare back with dead eyes. Flicking their pens, rudely tapping their smartphones. The head of EA’s team opens his mouth “We don-“
“ENOUGH!” Kimishima interrupts. His voice BOOMS across the room and wakes everyone up. EA employees drop their phones and sit up straight.
“I will not have my time wasted any further. If you want us to work with you after all the bullshit you have pulled in the past, we have our own demands. THESE ARE KIMISHIMA’S KONDITIONS.“
– Show us a game. Do not say “we will support NX” and rock up with a bunch of year-old ports or sports games with missing features. You said you would support Wii U at launch and we got a $60 port of Mass Effect 3 that was outsourced to a different developer. You couldn’t even make it yourselves. If this is your definition of “support”, you can shove it. Show that you care about game development. Show us you are not going to sabotage NX from the beginning like the Wii U. Otherwise, you are wasting everyone’s time by pretending to care.
– Don’t make SHIT. All your attempts to clone Wii Sports on the Wii had 40 second load times, graphical glitches, butchered multiplayer, unstable control schemes and poor user interfaces. You can’t get away with this when you’re being compared to Nintendo software. The Wii brought a lot of new people into gaming and this is something Nintendo does all the time with their mission of inclusive fun. When someone’s first exposure to gaming is one of your broken piece of shit titles, it creates a bad impression of gaming as a whole. People won’t be fooled again.
– No inferior versions. This just means don’t sabotage your efforts and treat NX like a lesser console. Missing online modes? Not acceptable. Bring your real franchises over and not full-priced spinoffs like Dead Space Extraction.
– Be a publisher. Sony and Microsoft might advertise your games for you and fight over your glorified presence but this is not normal, healthy behavior. For a publisher to grow you must support yourselves and understand the business. This is your job. You should know the sports audience if you make sports games. Your job right now is to make people give a shit about Madden, because nobody is buying it anymore.
– Use the console’s features. This is why Wii Sports was successful, it wasn’t just fun to play but new and fresh. So if anybody is going to give a shit about your NX library, it has to actually be useful and relevant to what people are playing on the console. You can’t port a PS4 game with the exact same controls. If you make a Splatoon ripoff it needs gyro aiming. A kart racer needs motion steering. Take advantage of the Miiverse. These are not difficult things to implement, and you might even have fun and discover something new. Whatever NX brings to the table, you need to be willing to adapt otherwise people will only care about Nintendo titles.
Nintendo does not need EA. EA made a whole bunch of shit for the Wii, but they played zero part in its success. In fact they are partly responsible for the bitterness gamers fostered for the console at the end of its life-cycle, with shitty software creating the false stigma that motion controls are bad. This also affected attitudes going forward, to the detriment of the Wii U.
EA may as well come out and say they never plan to support NX. I think that’s a decision they might have already made. These “conditions” are an attempt to make Nintendo look like the bad guys when EA has nothing to show. EA is a very weak example of an industry leader and Nintendo is better off not catering to them. Nobody fucking gives a shit about Madden anymore, so they can not dangle their sports games like some kind of prize. Nintendo is the only company that has actually increased the market for sports games in the last decade. Without EA, the NX game library will be higher quality, and Nintendo will have more freedom with console design and advertising. Why the fuck would they waste millions of dollars advertising at a soccer game? There’s going to be a Playstation logo shown 5 seconds later anyway. It’s a pointless pissing contest and Nintendo is much smarter than that. They are far better off doing their own thing, and if EA wants to have any success on Nintendo systems then they have to change their approach. Meeting over.
Pietriots 
“This is your job.”
The only thing that needs to be said on this subject, It is EA’s job, NOT Nintendo’s, to sell EA’s games. If they’re unable or unwilling to do that then they should go out of business and let someone more competent move in.
I wonder when people talk about how Nintendo should be bending over backwards for EA who they think should be bending over backwards to support Nintendo as well. The discussion is always framed in such a way that Nintendo is the one who needs to support everyone else when in reality without Nintendo there’s no platform for developers to develop for in the first place.
“But Nintendo needs to ensure that their games will sell!”
And who’s going to ensure that Nintendo’s own games sell? Who’s going to ensure that they’re platforms are going to sell? Oh, that’s right. Nintendo is supposed to do all of that themselves… while still pandering to failing developers.
I wonder why EA isn’t held to the same standards. I wonder why NO ONE ELSE is ever held to the same standards.
When someone can tell me who’s supposed to have Nintendo’s back in all of this, you know the company who’s taking all the risks here and is apparently supposed to be handing all the rewards to companies that want little more than to ride their coattails and then stomp them into the mud once they’re no longer useful to them, then there can be a real discussion on this subject.
Until then it’s little more than kids gripping about their parents grounding them after they burned down the garage. Yes, you should support you’re children but NOT when they’re completely out of control and making absurd demands. That is when you punish them, or at least let them experience the fallout from their own bad decisions.
The fact that Nintendo is even willing to talk with them at all shows a level of respect and maturity from them that I would never be able to muster myself after what I’ve seen EA pull over the generations.
Now that’s a garage that needs to be burned down.
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Nobody holds Nintendo to the same standards like other third parties because most gamers are insecure of actually giving a Nintendo system these days a chance.
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Yeah, I find it really strange how MS and Sony are treated so different. Square-Enix said they supported PS3 because they “felt sorry” for Sony and wanted to restore the “balance” in the console industry. Now, their current mission is the make PS4 a success, because it still hasn’t outsold Wii U in Japan. We’ve reached childish schoolyard antics here.
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When you’ve come to rely on being bribed simply to stay afloat because you bet on the wrong horse, it starts to make a lot of sense. Most 3rd parties are TERRIFIED of doing anything that might upset the boat. They simply take their bribes, release their rehashes, and wait for death because all it’s going to take is one big flop for any of the big developers left to go under.
Neither Sony nor MS are going to be willing to pump enough money into a large failing developer to keep them around. Look at Street Fighter V. Sony is helping to fund it, right? And yet the game came out as bare bones as was possible. The reason? That’s all Sony was willing to fund. Capcom was hoping to get enough pre-sales in order to finish development after the game was released. If Sony’s not willing to fund a complete SFV, what are the chances they would be willing to keep an entire 3rd party afloat? Things certainly don’t bode well for Shenmue 3 in that regard.
Pretty much the entire Japanese 3rd party development industry has gone or is in the process of going under. Western developers aren’t much better off. If either Sony or MS drop out all of them will quickly find themselves in a world of hurt. The only reason they’ve been able to make the games that they’ve been making is because of interference from Sony and MS. If they had to rely on themselves they all would have gone under last generation.
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replace EA with any other third party and you pretty much have the same effect. i couldnt care less if EA is “considering” to grace nintendo with their divine games, its becoming increasingly clear that a lot of smart people game on nintendo platforms and they are not going to fall for the garbage EA puts out.
as for myself if managed to live without EA games for a decade now i think ill continue to game without them.
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You bring up an interesting point. I’m trying to think of the last EA game I bought, because there’s nothing on Wii U or 3DS. It must have been NFS: Shift 2 on PS3, which they didn’t even develop. Good game though.
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I flat out refuse to buy any EA or Ubisoft game. First, nothing they make interests me in the slightest, so it’s not exactly a big boycott. Second, even if they did have something I wanted, I still wouldn’t support the companies that have done their best over the last ten years to wipe out the only source of video games that I actually like to play.
I’ve said it many times – Nintendo needs to completely abandon western publishers, and probably Squaresoft as well. I’m talking complete blackout: don’t send them devkits, don’t invite them to meetings, don’t even take their calls. Make sure those publishers understand that there are consequences for what they have done. Take all the time, money, and resources that would be wasted on those dirtbags, and invest it in small to mid-size studios. Create a small army of Retro Studios-like developers, and fill the calendar with every kind of release imaginable, from retro-style 2D Metroid to arcade style F-Zero and Star Fox titles to big “triple A” productions like Mario and Zelda. Buy M2. Buy Inticreates. Buy every indie developer that has proved itself to be worthy, like Galaxytrail Games. Nintendo has been carrying it’s consoles almost entirely on its own for three generations now. All they need to do is increase production.
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I’ve said this before back when the Wii U launched, but it bears repeating… Nintendo Needs to give EA the finger and release their own line of sports games. Get with Tecmo and release a new Tecmo Bowl. People would go apeshit over that. GameIpad support for developing custom plays, players, etc. Amiibo unlock special team uniforms. 3ds used as controllers for local play.
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I made the EA thing a joke with the NX post a few months back.
I absolutely hate being proven right on this shit!
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here are 6 sports games Nintendo better than EA sports
Wave Race: Blue Storm
1080 ° Avalanche
NBA Courtside 2002 **
Excite Truck
Excitebike 64
Ridge Racer 64 (developed by Nintendo, not Namco)
** NBA Courtside 2002 having great depth and completely outclassed its competitor, NBA Live 2002.
The game highlighted what Electronic Arts was missing from their own basketball games.
In addition to matching their statistical accuracy NBA Courtside was a better simulation and offered an Arcade Mode that competed with the scope of the also-praised NBA Street of EA sports
Better the graphics, gameplay, artificial intelligence, and ball physics, and particular praise for the sound effects’ level of detail.
In a few words who needs EA?!
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That s according to Nintendo president Tatsumi Kimishima , who has spoken more on plans for 2016.
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I ran across an interesting article just recently:
http://www.develop-online.net/news/casual-shift-drove-developers-from-ea/0105205
I don’t remember this getting any coverage when it happened, which coincidentally happened to be during the period when EA was announcing more “core” focused games while pulling back on Wii support.
Now… Stop me if you’ve heard this one: What if EA did want to be on board with the Wii U, and had planned to fully support it, but of some kind of internal coup (like employees threatening to quit en mass) forced them to drop their plans?
I would be the last person to defend EA but if this article seems to explain a lot. Why EA dropped the Wii even when it was successful for them, their sudden foray away from sports games and into more original “core” focused software, and their inexplicable dropping of the Wii U before it had even been released: They were trying to keep a revolt from erupting among their own employees.
Remember what happened with the Wii? How developers were publicly allowed to attack the system with no repercussions? What if they weren’t allowed to? What if they simply couldn’t be controlled? It’s a terrifying prospect, to think that angry developers who refused to work on the Wii because they felt it was beneath them, might actually have that kind of power, but it makes sense if you think about it.
It also explains the near complete lack of 3rd party support for the Wii U. If other developers got wind of a coup inside EA that drove them away from the platform, you’d better believe that most others would follow suit, or risk possibly loosing their own employees.
That also means that it would be literally impossible for Nintendo to get 3rd party support, even if they paid for it like Sony and MS do. The hatred for them from certain developers is so strong that they would rather quit than work for a company that might require them to work on one of their platforms.
The patients really might be running the asylum after all it seems…
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Actually, what happened was whoever the guy’s name was who was running EA circa 2010/2011 (aka “we will give unprecedented support!”) was looking to Nintendo for an easy way out for cash. The core focus you mentioned? it back-fired, heavily; as good as Mirror’s Edge and Dead Space were, they did not pull those sweet sales numbers (despite somehow getting two sequels that also sold as poorly). So literally, the “we totally love Nintendo” is blatant PR and nothing else from these third parties and EA pulled it full force. Even funnier, the guy stepped down circa 2012.
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Interesting idea. I do think there is this internal “culture” with a lot of Western developers and the media that does not include Nintendo. However, I find it difficult to believe a developer wouldn’t be excited to work on the market leading console. Wii gave them a chance to show their ideas to the world and it turns out they had none. EA’s employees being unhappy is also their problem and their responsibility.
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Don’t worry too much about it. It was just a theory I came up with when I read that article, though it does fit well. EA making those new “core” games was their attempt to placate their Wii hating staff while simultaneously pulling back support for the platform. The fact that developers actually quit rather than having to see themselves work on it. The strangeness surrounding the entire “unprecedented partnership” and massive pull of 3rd party support before the platform even came out. There’s definitely enough evidence there to build an interesting hypothesis.
Not that it’s true in the slightest but again, it’s interesting to speculate.
I suppose it’s because I never realized just how deep the hate for the Wii ran through the games development industry. That developers would rather quit than have to work on the system at all. And from there I extrapolated a “what if” scenario concerning the idea that maybe this wasn’t an isolated incident.
It’s scary to think, no matter how remote the possibility, that this theory might be real. It would mean that the games industry is already dead. A walking corpse that at any time could simply fall over and cease to function.
I don’t think anyone, not even Nintendo, could survive that.
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