John Riccitiello, Chief Executive Officer for Electronic Arts, has had quite a bit to say to IndustryGamers recently, including how he perceives weakness in Nintendo’s Wii console.
“I’m not as negative on it [as you might think],” he explained, “but I tend to be a little less sugar coated in our earnings calls, so if you stack up my language against some of our competitors’ CEOs it can come across that way because I did tell people that the Wii business was coming in below expectations.”
“But let’s be realistic about what really happened for EA on Wii this year. Our year-to-date Wii revenues have doubled versus last year; we have a 19% share. I don’t think any third party publisher has a share higher than that on any platform… I’d have to double check that; we’re in the 20s on 360/PS3 and Activision may be up there on one of those platforms. But Wii is a very successful third-party platform for EA.”
He then went on to defend the shortcomings of EA and other third-party publishers: “I think it’s also fair to say that people are still grappling with it. I think Dead Space Extraction was one of the best pieces of software built on the platform and it did not perform well. It’s a strong IP but for some reason it did not resonate in a way that brought consumers to the store to buy it. And Madden hasn’t performed to my expectations so far this year, even though it’s a fabulous piece of software.”
“EA Sports Active and our Hasbro stuff have done really, really well. So you start to create a certain perception in your mind of the type of consumer that works on the Wii, that’s a little different, doesn’t have the core gamer in mind, etc. But there are an awful lot of core gamers that have this platform and there are oftentimes some surprising breakthroughs that feel pretty core.”
“I think the Wii is confounding to people because it’s so darn big and successful,” he added. “Even this year, what most people perceive as a down year, they’re going to sell just in the Western markets somewhere in the mid-teens of millions of hardware units, which is a blow-away success for a console. And yet it’s lower than they (and we) originally thought. But that’s a little bit like saying they won the Super Bowl by a smaller point spread.”
Riccitiello points out that catering and marketing to Nintendo’s audience has always been a challenge, but it seems to be even more so on the Wii. He goes on to note that he is proud of the teams who made Madden and Dead Space Extraction, even though they didn’t resonate with the market.
“I think, in general, publishers have had trouble finding sustained success and consistent understanding of what makes a success on Nintendo platforms historically because they’re so oriented towards first-party content like Mario and Zelda. So I think the Wii is going to be an evolving picture [for third parties],” he concluded.
