Popularity Of Wii Forces Sports-Based Games To Rethink Strategy

Nintendo Wii Forcing Sports Games To Rethink Strategies

The Nintendo Wii motion-based interface has “really forced the sports gaming industry to rethink its strategies, specifically how to reach the casual gamer, the virtually untapped female and family demographics,” according to ESPN’s Steve Bunin. EA Sports President Peter Moore said the rise in popularity of the Wii “certainly has broadened the industry from a demographic point of view.” Moore: “There are more and more women gaming now. We’re looking at 68% of all North American households that have a gaming machine in there and, we’re also looking at 40% of all gamers now are female. … That obviously has opportunities for us, also presents challenges for us.” One of those challenges have been reformatting EA Sports’ popular “Madden” franchise into a Wii-compatible version. Moore said, “We really had no choice. When the Wii was propelling to be about 50% of the installed base in North America, obviously as a development team, we looked at what we could do to bring … a hands-and-feet-based game to a motion-control experience. And while we've had mixed results, we certainly have been able to deliver ‘Madden’ on the Wii for the last three years now. We continue to experiment with what this means for that more broad-based game, and we'll continue to be able to develop that game on the Wii and we'll get this thing right eventually.” FanHouse.com’s Jon Weinbach noted part of the problem for videogame companies is “just simply maintaining the sports marketplace niche in videogames.” Noting Activision’s “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2” has brought in around $500M in less than a month, Weinbach said, “I think the question going forward is: how will the sports marketplace continue to get whatever remaining dollars there are for videogame spending?” (“OTL,” ESPN, 11/24).

EVAN ALMIGHTY: 2K Sports announced that Rays 3B Evan Longoria will be the cover athlete for its "MLB 2K10" videogame. For the first time in the baseball game franchise's history, fans will be able to select the cover image for the game. Online voting opened Tuesday at 2KSports.com/vote, where fans can choose from several box cover designs. Voting ends December 8, with the final cover art for the game to be revealed December 11. 2K sports this summer ran a similar promotion allowing fans to select an image of Lakers G Kobe Bryant for the "NBA 2K10" cover art (THE DAILY).

Fans Will Choose The Longoria Cover Image For "MLB 2K10"