The Sad Tale of EA

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As a company, EA is questionable at best. They always seem to implement scummy practices such as DLC and Loot Crates into their games. They also rush their developers who spend hours each day doing overtime work, but they never finish the game and EA releases the unfinished game as a finished product. However, you cannot deny that some of their games are great. Maybe not at the same level of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, but great nonetheless. Having EA's full of the Switch is something that we need, but we should have a look at the roadblocks that are holding this back.

EA doesn't care

EA games have never sold particularly well on Nintendo's consoles, even the fast-selling Wii. The Wii released sooner and sold more than the Xbox 360, but the other Xbox 360 version of FIFA 08 sold 133% of what the Wii version sold. Because of this, EA never really took to Nintendo consoles. In fact, there is evidence that they might be trying to hold back sales of Nintendo versions of games.

I'm sure that you've heard that the Switch version of FIFA 18 sold for just 1% of all FIFA 18 sales in the UK in the first week. Unless you've looked deeper into it, this should have alarmed you. However, this disparity was actually EA's fault as they only sold 30,000 units to retailers and the Switch version was sold out in most game stores. This is despite content being missing from the game and various bugs including missing textures for players' heads. There is no doubt that the game would have sold better if it included the entire game and also was properly stocked. This forced sales disparity is a marketing ploy as an excuse to not put EA games on Nintendo systems.

It seems as if something is holding EA back from wanting to put their games on the Switch. It would probably take away too many of their overworked staff. But what could this be?

Frostbite Engine

The excuse that EA keeps using is that the engine that they use does not run well on the Switch. This is definitely a reasonable excuse, and I wouldn't expect EA to be building an optimised version of Frostbite because they don't see much of an opportunity in selling to the Nintendo Switch market. Once the Switch proves to sell enough for EA's liking, and they release a game that a lot of Switch owners buy, EA will then have an interest in porting the engine over to the Switch. Only time and good sales will tell!

Shaky Relationship

EA has a poor relationship with Nintendo for two reasons; the Wii U sold poorly and they refused to accept the EA Origin service.

Just like the Wii, everyone expected the Wii U to sell crazy numbers. In fact, Nintendo themselves even predicted the system would hit 130 million copies! As we all know, this was not the case. Many third parties put a lot of money into Wii U development and were shocked to see that it was not worth the investment. This struck EA worse than anyone else as they were one of the first developers to get a dev kit, even before Ubisoft!

The second issue causing this relationship is the refusal to accept the EA Origin service. Before the Wii U launch, EA offered to put Origin, a game distribution service, on the Wii U. Nintendo agreed. However, EA of course got greedy. They wanted Origin to replace the existing Nintendo Network services. This would mean that EA would have full control over all digital game distribution services. They could charge $50 for $10 DLC. Nintendo rightfully walked away from this agreement and their relationship has been shaky ever since.

Toxic Fans

After the Star Wars Battlefront II controversy, Nintendo fans have been driving the EA criticism bandwagon. Star Wars Battlefront II is a very good game with one major patched flaw. However, Nintendo fans still called the the game very bad. People usually have a negative opinion on those who criticise them the most and it is easy to imagine that EA executives feel this way about Nintendo fans. If the toxic fans were to be less harsh on EA, then the regular fans who just want to play some games will benefit.

The Future

I am very optimistic for the future as I believe that as soon as the Switch reaches a certain sales threshold for EA, they will jump at the opportunity to put any game on the system. Hopefully they will move away from their shady practices and then the community will be happy with their games, because a lot of their games are very good!