What do you mean?

They already worked with PS3 and 360 though, so they know the architecture. If the engine is then not working well by just dropping it on another platform (WiiU) then it's obvious that it needs more work (and thus a higher investment) than on other platforms.

EA is sabotaging all platforms equally. Their efforts were incredibly poor on 360 and they still sold enough copies to make sequel after sequel (so it paid off in the end). PS3 versions at the time were in 90% of all cases the inferior versions.

FIFA 13 on WiiU is still an awesome game, even if it's closer to FIFA 12 (which is an awesome game by itself). Compare that to the shittyness of FIFA 06 on 360 (Europe sales are missing by the way. it was easily at 400k before the bug took the sales away). Same case with Madden.

NFS Carbon sold over a million on PS3 even though it was a late port. Most Wanted on WiiU is selling well below Carbon week after week.

Battlefield 2 Modern Combat is the inferior console spin-off to Battlefield 2 (which the 360 would be able to run in theory) and it came out 6 months after the launch of the last gen consoles and still sold well on 360.

Not sure entirely of what he means but that comment has been the fall back criticism third parties have stuck to for decades yet here we are where they've had 8 months for free, it's not a case of it being hard to compete against first parties third parties just want things laid out for them on a plate with minimal effort. People shouldn't mislead themselves it's not hardware power or first party competition it's a clash of approaches and views.

I think it's more a case of third-parties being creatures of habit. Some franchises release during the year, but the big franchises always release around Christmas time. They probably factor that in when they write up their production schedules.

I guess the pont is that it wouldn't have been practical for them to take advantage of that 8-month period even if they'd known about it months ahead of time. Especially when you consider that that space was only there because Nintendo aggressively delayed their own releases. Even if they'd known they'd have a window to work with, there wouldn't have been much they could do to have a game ready to release in that window.

And when you get right down to it, competition almost has to be a factor. On Nintendo platforms, there's usually upwards of 50% of holiday sales they have completely wrapped up, with third parties splitting the rest amongst themselves; Week of December 8, 2012, Nintendo had 7 3DS games in the top 75, totaling more than half the total for that platform. Third parties had none. When you look at third-parties on other platforms, though, the picture is a lot more rosy. More overall sales, with each getting a proportionately larger share.

I'm not saying first party supremacy is the ONLY factor dissuading third parties, or that their business habits don't create conflict, but I don't think one can simply dismiss the way Nintendo's grip on their own platform provides a substantially smaller pot for third parties to split.

need for speed was what, 5 months late? mass effect 3 came a week after the trilogy on every platform except wii u. madden and fifa were 2012 versions renamed as 2013. that's intentionally sabotageing the games for them to sell bad and give an excuse not to release more games.

That's actually a good point. It does further the problem that I was presenting. If FB2 was clock speed intensive but FB3 wasn't (and is very near ready with BF4 due out end of october so chances are they had working builds in the time of WiiU's sku release), then why plan on releasing BF3 and not BF4? The whole thing was upside down, why were they releasing BF3 2 years after it released on the other consoles?

It all just doesn't hold together.

Yup and I just explained that they did the same thing with PS3 and Xbox 360, except that FIFA 13 on WiiU is much better than FIFA 06 on 360, Madden NFL 13 is also better than Madden NFL 06, NFS Most Wanted on WiiU is better than NFS Carbon on PS3 (which also came out later as I already pointed out).

And while Mass Effect 3 had an unfortunate timing on WiiU, you can't really blame them for charging full price for it (though they should've included the DLCs) or that they didn't port the whole trilogy.
Mass Effect trilogy on WiiU would have involved porting all three games, which means 3 times the investment and 3 times the development time (or getting more people that are working on other projects to the WiiU project). Which also means that it needs to sell 3 times as much as ME3 alone to break even.

I don't see much correlation between effort and sales when it comes to ports on Nintendo platforms to be honest. Black Ops 2 didn't sell all that great on the Wii U and it was a pretty good port.

Nintendo consoles simply don't benefit much from ports, even during the GameCube days, EA games would generally worse on the GCN even when Nintendo added Mario characters into them and you had the GCN logo at the end of EA TV commercials.

It's a demographic problem -- EA's main demographic are men age 12/13-35, especially sports fans. And that demographic simply has never been a strength for Nintendo.

Fair point but tbh you can't really blame Nintendo for being a force on their own platform, Sony for example found out the hard way with the PS3 why the strong first party approach should be part of a companies strategy and MS have for years tried to emulate the strat themselves, ironically it's third parties themselves who are the cause of this situation because platform holders realize they can't solely rely on them. Third parties are going to just have to accept it because we're not far off from a gen where first party domination issues will stretch across all platforms rather then trying to run from the problem they have to adapt to it otherwise they'll find themselves with their pants down at some point.

I don't blame Nintendo, obviously. It's their system, afterall. But it doesn't change the reality that they are far more competitive on their own platform than anyone else, which makes their system inherently less attractive for publishers to work on.