Video-game designer Nick Earl spent eight months holed up with his development team rushing to adapt The Godfather for Nintendo Co's Wii.
The reason for the long hours: Earl's employer, Electronic Arts Inc, like some of its competitors, underestimated demand for the Wii, whose motion-activated wand lets players wield a virtual sword, mimic real golf swings or strangle a victim. Instead, game makers put most of their resources into Sony Corp's PlayStation 3, which was released two days earlier in November with a more conventional hand controller.
Now, publishers are scrambling to get titles to the 3.56 million US and Japanese Wii owners who have made the machine the top-selling game console this year.
"Those companies are backtracking," said Anthony Gikas, an analyst at Piper Jaffray & Co in Minneapolis. "They're going to need to get their best-branded product on that platform. That will take a good nine to 12 months."
A shortage of Wii games contributed to a 25 percent drop in sales in February from a year earlier at Redwood City, California-based Electronic Arts, the world's largest video-game publisher, said Todd Greenwald, an analyst at Nollenberger Capital Partners in San Francisco. Industry sales in February rose 28 percent.
Shares of Electronic Arts have risen 3.1 percent this year, the smallest gain among the four biggest publishers.
US and Japanese sales of Wii players totaled 1.47 million in January and February, market researchers NPD Group Inc and Enterbrain said. PlayStation 3 tallied 604,331, while stores sold 584,329 of Microsoft Corp's Xbox 360 consoles. Wii is also leading in Europe, London-based researcher Screen Digest said.
Wii games, all produced by Kyoto, Japan-based Nintendo, took three of the top 10 sales spots in the US in February, said NPD, based in Port Washington, New York. Not a single US publisher had a Wii game in the top 20 in February.
Nintendo's lead will widen, pressuring companies even more. Researcher International Data Corp (IDC) predicts Nintendo will ship 16.1 million players this year, outpacing Microsoft's 9.87 million Xbox 360 and Sony's 9.1 million PlayStation 3. Wii game sales will total US$2.2 billion, trailing only Xbox 360, said IDC, based in Framingham, Massachusetts.
Electronic Arts wasn't the only publisher slow to see Wii's appeal. New York-based Take-Two Interactive Software Inc, maker of Grand Theft Auto games, had no Wii titles when the player was released and now plans to have three this year, spokesman Jim Ankner said.
Activision Inc., based in Santa Monica, California, plans to release six Wii games this year, giving the second-largest publisher a total of 11, spokeswoman Maryanne Lataif said.
Game companies had expected PlayStation 3 to dominate based on the success of PlayStation 2, said John Taylor, an analyst with Arcadia Investment Corp in Portland, Oregon. Sony has sold more than 100 million PlayStation 2 since 2001, including 37.7 million in the US, making it the top-seller. Nintendo's previous console, GameCube, sold 11.7 million units in the US.
Perceptions changed when Nintendo unveiled Wii last May in Los Angeles. Demonstration consoles attracted long lines of developers waiting to swing a virtual tennis racquet.
"People got their hands on that controller and started playing games and said, `This is fun, this is going to do better than we expected,'" Electronic Arts chief executive officer Lawrence Probst said at a Morgan Stanley conference last Thursday.
With six months to go before Wii's release and games requiring a year or more to develop, publishers knew they were in trouble.
Electronic Arts bought Bountiful, Utah-based Headgate Studios Inc last in November to bolster Wii development. With Godfather Black Hand Edition and Tiger Woods Golf 07 in stores, Electronic Arts has six Wii titles and plans to have about a dozen in total this year.
"We came back and redeployed a lot of our resources," said Earl, who heads Electronic Arts' Redwood Shores studio.
The results are seen in Godfather, where players use their hands to shake the wand and an attachment, dubbed a nunchuk, back and forth as if strangling or jostling someone. The wand also can be used to punch or shoot victims.
"You really feel like you grab someone," Earl said.
The Wii may prove to be a windfall, since games cost just US$2 million to US$5 million to create, a fraction of the US$20 million to US$30 million spent on PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 titles, analyst Taylor said. In addition, Wii appears to be expanding the market, rather than stealing sales from rivals, he said.
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