Where "abandoning" means that particular shop had been working on PC ports before. I don't believe we'll be shocked when some other arm of EA's corp will suck up the PC ports.

The company announced that it has bought Headgate Studios, the developer of the last six PC installments in the Tiger Woods PGA Tour franchise and Madden NFL 07. Now the shop, redubbed EA Salt Lake, will "focus on development for the Nintendo Wii."

And even that says "focus" rather than "exclusively focus."

What's especially interesting is that EA's created a Wii shop but that it's "that easy", so to speak, to swap a PC house into a Wii dev shop. I guess it's a sign the Wii is doing well, but I don't EA bought this on the spur of roll-out sales.

By  rufbo, at 01 December, 2006 16:24  

I would imagine that about ten are products that appear on other platforms, and there might be two or three Wii-specific products, including Wii Sims.

Sorry for double-post.

This is interesting -- at least one of two or three Wii-specific products is a remake of an existing franchise. Sure, it looks like Virtua Fighter Kids, but the original jive is, at the very least, biting off the old stuff.

By  rufbo, at 01 December, 2006 16:30  

"What's especially interesting is that EA's created a Wii shop but that it's "that easy", so to speak, to swap a PC house into a Wii dev shop."

Is it really easy though? Or does it bode ill for Wii support?

After all, EA isn't devoting an EA-established developer to the Wii. They just bought a PC game company and told them to make Wii games.

One could easily view it as EA seeing a use for flinging some token support towards the Wii at least in the short term without upsetting any of their normal structured support for the PS2, PS3, Xbox360, DS, PSP, and multiplatform antics in general.

By  Baines, at 01 December, 2006 19:41