The title of this story seems like a pretty obvious statement to almost any gamer out there, especially those of us with Wii’s who want the system to have a more robust online feature set. However, the difference between the community bitching about the matter and a developer actually coming out and saying they’re not getting enough support is monumental. That latter happened just a few hours ago at EA’s Bloggers Day for The Sims franchise.
While Erik Zwerling, the Producer of MySims PC, was taking us through a little tour of MySims PC, the PC version of the Wii game MySims (more on it later), one of the the fellow bloggers in the room asked why the robust online features of the new PC game weren’t in place for last year’s Wii version of the game. To this Zwerling responded that while he isn’t involved with the Wii development, the reasoning as he understood it was that “Nintendo isn’t supporting the developers in that area enough, so doing that isn’t viable at the moment.”
Now, MySims on the Wii did come out almost a year ago so maybe this has changed, but when looking at the online support for the Wii Sims games we’re seeing here, it doesn’t really look like it. None of them really go online other than a few challenge modes and picture swapping features and I can’t imagine that EA doesn’t want to jump right in with more in depth online features as MySims PC shows. It’s been a good long time now since the Wii’s launch, why is Nintendo still dragging their feet on this?
Update: EA has got in touch with us about this and said that Zwerling was discussing the Wii’s online ability at the time of the original MySims release and commenting that it most likely wasn’t able to handle the online features that are present in MySims PC. So how is working with Nintendo for online functions? We’ll be talking with someone from EA soon about that, so stay tuned.
