According to what Peter Moore says, some employees at EA Sports left because of the Expanded Audience: (EDIT: employees didn’t leave but were not excited at all about making games for the ‘casual gamers’)

“[They] couldn’t take the change of pace,” he added. “It was hard. A lot of people at that time thought they would move on from our studios–they wanted to chase the core consumer.”

Moore said that EA Sports learned from the change and has established itself a “position with social and family entertainment.”

Prior to the Wii coming out, I did hear some game developers say that if the Wii became successful, they would leave the ‘games industry’ to work in the ‘movie industry’. I wonder where those guys are now.

You know my perspective on all this. I remember the days of the Generation Zero game developers (you know, the ones who actually built this ‘industry’). They wanted to put their talents to work on something than making bombs for the Vietnam War. They often worked on games in garages. They had no prestige. The economy of the 70s was quite similar to today. Their parents thought they were a failure because they wouldn’t get a ‘real job’. All these guys wished was to be able to make video-games for a living and were very grateful if they could do so.

Today, many game developers are getting upset that they don’t get to make games for themselves. These guys are in for major humble pie. With the way how the trends are moving against the “games industry”, it is not certain that the “games industry” will survive. In a world where many people are losing their jobs, let alone not having jobs that they wanted in the first place, a game developer should consider himself lucky if he has steady employment making games… any games.

The era where a game developer could make a game purely for his own interests are long gone. They should be more concerned whether their company will stay in business. EA’s change of direction toward the Expanded Audience might have just saved the company… and all their jobs.

Publishers’ reaction to the Wii is very odd. Their reaction is, “Nintendo games are always the top sellers, what is there left for us?” They don’t realize that Nintendo’s job is to increase the installed base with their games which is why their games are in the top sales. Nintendo doesn’t have the luxury to make games (aside from a few) that doesn’t drive momentum. Third parties do.

So it is no surprise they would see Wii Sports pack-in as if Nintendo stole all the ’sports dollars’. The reality that they should have saw was that all the people who bought a Wii for Wii Sports are INTERESTED in sports games. This means these customers will buy a Golf game or a Baseball game or another sports title. NES gamers who bought the NES for Super Mario Brothers clearly bought other platform games.

Instead of seeing the grand opportunity in front of them, of all these new customers who bought a system to play video-game sports, these EA Sports guys saw it as a negative! They thought Wii Sports took AWAY any potential customers instead of actually building the potential customers.

This is how many outside companies view the Wii. They believe all the money is being ’soaked up’ by Nintendo games and there is nothing left for them!