Broken Record.
EA announces that ‘we intend to bring 50% of our products to the Wii platform; it is the market leader and should be treated as such.’ EA also says that ‘We intend to bring more of our core titles to the Wii’ and then announces Dead Space Wii. (This doesn’t make sense because of a value differentiator between Wii purchasers and high end PC and PS360 purchasers.)
So to examine what core means, EA does have a core base on the Wii, EA’s current products core deal within the borders of all the Wii purchasers of their products before, in fact a portion of all Wii sales are because of EA titles on the Wii, that means that EA’s core consist of pre-EA interest Wii owners and those who bought Wii to play EA’s offering on Wii. Their core users though are obviously the ones who buy their products.
In juxtapose Nintendo also has a portion of this pie; many people buy Wii to play Nintendo games, they posses such a large portion of that pie and the result is in games like Wii Fit and Mario Kart even Mario and Sonic games. “Only Nintendo games sell on Nintendo platforms.” That quote is true because Nintendo made the firm investment to attract people to their platform who would be interested in things only Nintendo was/is doing. In the end EA and Nintendo do not share a core, so when EA refers to “core” they are talking about their present consumers and not Nintendo’s.
Ubisoft… just mimics Nintendo I’m not certain if Dogz is a good game but I know Nintendogs scored quite a bit of praise. This leads into perceived value, the rate of new information is digested and consumer awareness to begin with, Dogz was marketed very, very well and after the smoke cleared Ubisoft proclaimed that they understood Nintendo, I’m waiting to see their Brawl clones results next but Ubisoft is a safe publisher and instead of investing into core HD IP’s on the Wii they instead took the stance of taking the successful IP’s core game play or purpose and make a near carbon copy. Perceived value is that the product is worth what it’s priced for and the time to invest is considered in an after thought, Ubisoft has a strong marketing muscle and understands the timing needed to push their games, this has lead to their success on the DS and even with Wii.
Finally Dead Space is appreciated by the HD fan base, for it’s immersive qualities as well as a number of other factors, the games PC version receives just as much acclaim as it’s console versions, the only thing holding this game back is it’s horrible timing, as the game is a new IP anyway. But in relation to Core, EA is talking within terms of demographics and that wont work, the game has to change it’s values in other words it can’t be the HD version with Wii controls, and it can’t just be a Wii controlled Dead Space.
All the Wii does is allow for a wider variety of demographics easy access to games they would be interested in, Dead Space can’t be made for technophiles and HD fans because they understand the traditional controller as a standard and not just a medium. Not saying they should make Dead Spacez but that the game would of faired similarly to CoD5 if it was released a long side it’s HD counter parts. (Granted other elements hindered CoD:WaW on Wii sales, such as supply/shelf space and consumer awareness.)
In the end HD Core doesn’t = Wii Core, EA may have a Core on the HD consoles but the similarities aren’t shared with Wii. Companies should be looking for a way to increase the amount of people buying the hardware to play their games, not tapping into the group of people who already own that hardware.
