Game Developers Play Catch Up On Wii

According to a story today in the Daily Herald, game developers such as Electronic Arts are now catching up to bring titles to the Wii, as they had underestimated the incredible demand for the innovative console. Apparently, EA had Nick Earl and his development team, holed up for eight months rushing to adapt “The Godfather” for the Wii.

Going by the previous success of the Playstation 2, game developers banked on the Playstation 3 to trump the competition and so placed focus there. However, 3.6 million U.S. and Japanese Wii owners have made the machine the top-selling game console this year.

“Those companies are backtracking,” said Anthony Gikas, an analyst at Piper Jaffray & Co. in Minneapolis. “They’re going to need to get their best-branded product on that platform. That will take a good nine to 12 months.”

The article reads:

Wii games took three of the top 10 sales spots in the U.S. in February, said NPD, based in Port Washington, N.Y. Not a single U.S. publisher had a Wii game in the top 20 in February. A shortage of Wii games contributed to a 25 percent drop in sales in February from a year earlier at Redwood City, Calif.-based Electronic Arts, the world’s largest video-game publisher, said Todd Greenwald, an analyst at Nollenberger Capital Partners in San Francisco. Industry sales in February rose 28 percent.

Researcher IDC predicts Nintendo will ship 16.1 million players this year, outpacing Microsoft’s 9.87 million Xbox 360s and Sony’s 9.1 million PlayStation 3s. Wii game sales will total $2.2 billion, trailing only Xbox 360, said IDC, based in Framingham, Mass.

Electronic Arts wasn’t the only publisher slow to see Wii’s appeal. New York-based Take-Two Interactive Software Inc., maker of “Grand Theft Auto” games, had no Wii titles when the player was released. It now plans to have three this year, said spokesman Jim Ankner.

Perceptions changed when Nintendo demonstrated Wii last May in Los Angeles. Consoles attracted long lines of developers. With six months to go before Wii’s release and games requiring a year or more to develop, publishers knew they were in trouble.

In response, Electronic Arts bought Bountiful, Utah-based Headgate Studios Inc. in November to bolster Wii development. Electronic Arts has six Wii titles and plans to have about a dozen in total this year. Activision Inc., based in Santa Monica, Calif., plans to release six Wii games this year, giving the second-largest publisher a total of 11, said spokeswoman Maryanne Lataif.

Paris-based Ubisoft Entertainment, the quickest to recognize Wii’s appeal, saw sales for the December quarter jump 24 percent to $405 million.

Source: Bloomberg