The Wii has been a consistent enigma for third-party publishers, leaving them scrambling to try and capture part of what seems to be a large install base. Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello reiterated these frustrations during a conference call with investors coming after the company's fiscal report.
"To be honest with you, I think the Wii platform has been a little weaker than we had certainly anticipated. And there is no lack of frustration to be doing that at precisely the time where we have the strongest third-party share," said Riccitiello according to GI.biz. "Frankly, I think they need more beats in the year than they get out of a first-party slate – to be able to have the Wii software platform perform as well as they would like. We are building the products that I think the most highly rated on the platform and at this point in time, generating the most revenue of any third-party platform."
"I think driving revenues up on that platform from where we already are, which is up substantially from where we were a year ago, we are reaching out to Nintendo to find ways to partner to push third-party software harder," he continued. "Wii is where we are missing it and so I really do think that the opportunity exists to find different ways to partner with first party in this case to sort of help establish in the minds of the consumer legitimacy of some of these other brands when they are going out multiplatform because very, very few multiplatform titles are succeeding on the Wii."
Riccitiello also pointed out that the oft-stated 50 million Wii consoles out there in homes isn't feasibly reachable by Western publishers like EA, because of the difficulties with reaching consumers in Japan. "I would point out, by the way, the 50 million number of course includes Asia or Japan and I don’t think any of the Western companies are likely to participate much at all on the Wii platform in Japan, so the addressable market we see is just a little bit below 40 million but that is still an important opportunity," added Riccitiello.
Fueling these comments was almost certainly the sales of Dead Space: Extraction for Wii coming in at little over 9,000, adding credence to our argument that the mature audience for Wii just isn't there.
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