If Dead Space: Extraction doesn’t do well on the Wii, well, by howdy, EA may stop producing games where you have to kill things on the console for good.
“One of the explanations we have is that there’s a lot of double ownership,” said Dr. Jens Uwe Intat, European VP at Electronic Arts. “So people having a Wii and a 360 and/or PS3. They’re really playing different types of games on those two machines, and historically up to now we assume those people will have played the more mature content on the more high-tech machine.Dead Space: Extraction is going to be a very nice test of that hypothesis, because we’re really building a game where the Wii version is very different to the Dead Space game on 360 and PS3, and we’ll actually see whether we can reach more people with a) a great game and b) interesting content.”
That’s the current culture of innovation for you. The game is “different” because it’s on rails and… well, that’s really the only reason. But now EA has a nice CYA quote in the can so they make excuses if this game doesn’t sell. “Well, I mean it was different, and it didn’t sell, so Bob’s your uncle and it’s back to making PopCap style games for the Wii!” At which time those games fail too and EA goes back to making Dead Space on rails shooters for the Wii. At which point that fails and… well, you get the picture. At no point does any real innovation enter the picture.