Peter Moore’s talks EA’s opinion of Wii U, says Wii didn’t have a lot of “stick” with people
“I think that the Wii was so revolutionary that it took the market by surprise…. That thing just exploded because it was a brand new way of playing videogames, completely new. The Wii U feels more evolutionary, the idea of this SmartGlass thing that Microsoft talked about was attractive and I think it will do good numbers. But if you’re saying, will it sell in the first 36 months what the Wii did, I think that might be a challenge because the Wii just exploded. Sometimes you like that, sometimes you actually don’t.
“You want to build a steady community that is sticky and stays with you, and doesn’t treat the Wii as we’re now seeing — there’s a lot of Wiis in the world, most of which sit on a shelf somewhere. You know. And so it was like a meteor that roared across the sky and disappeared. And you look at the industry numbers on it now, year on year the Wii has just dropped, and clearly we don’t make any games for it anymore. It just has not given the level of engagement that you need to have with a console. And that becomes the key. Selling games that are ostensibly offline was fun for a while, but then the connected engagement that we look for and the industry looks for, we couldn’t deliver.
“They made the right moves as far as online connectivity, hard drive space, having the ability to bring external hard drives in there. 32, 64 gigabytes sounds like a lot from when I first joined the industry, but you’ll figure out that takes a lot of hard drive management if you get a lot of games. We will see. But I think they recognize that they need to be part of this connected ecosystem.” – EA COO Peter Moore
I’d say he pretty much hit the nail on the head as far as his “sticky” remarks! A lot of us feel a bit offended when we hear that because we– being a Nintendo fansite– know a lot of people who really enjoy their Wiis. That being said, I think on the whole it really doesn’t have the consistency of the other home consoles. It is being treated as, for lack of a better term, much more of a novelty.
