Nintendo says relationship with EA is “great”, third-parties and sales
Nintendo of America senior director of corporate communications Charlie Scibetta says that “the relationship is great between Nintendo and Electronic Arts.”
But when pressed further and asked what makes their relationship “great”, Scibetta would only note:
“You’ll have to ask EA when it comes to any future announcements or future product plans. I don’t want to speak for them.”
As far as overall third-party support for Wii U is concerned, Scibetta admitted that the console needs to sell so that external companies can reach a large audience:
“Third parties want the same thing that we do, which is the install base to grow so they have a larger audience to sell their games to. We feel that’s our job to help drive that install base, and we haven’t had the software so far in 2013 that’s going to do that. But we’re confident between now and the holiday and again in 2014, we do have the software that’s going to grow that install base. And when that happens, we think that Wii U will be a far more attractive platform for third parties to want to publish on. The same thing happened on Nintendo 3DS that we think will happen on Wii U, which started off slow, but when the software came around, the hardware sales came. We’re looking for the same dynamic for Wii U.”
