“In all the games we made, everything was focused on making things more realistic,” he said when looking back at the history of games development prior to the arrival of the Wii. This was no different amongst EA’s clutch of sports games, he said: “Each year – particularly at the beginning of a cycle – sports games were used to show how realistic video games had become.

“That was fine back in the early ’80s when there was a huge chasm between what the real world looked like and what games showed.

“But then this thing [the Wii] came along and presented us with some challenges. The dynamics changed with the launch of the Wii – play and fun was coming back in, the demographic was changing enormously, and the amount of time to play was being compressed.”

For EA Sports, that meant its biggest competition was Wii Sports. Moore said that the firm’s dev teams “were being challenged by this sports experience which was being delivered for free with every piece of hardware”.

However staff too used to making games for core consumers, and unwilling to approach making games for bigger audiences less hung up on technical on-screen oomph, couldn’t take the change of pace, he added.

“It was hard. A lot of people at that time thought they would move on from our studios –they wanted to chase the core consumer.”

EA Sports has two major development studios for its games – one in Vancouver, Canada, the other in Flordia, USA.

I bolded the above. The complaint was that Wii was bringing play and fun back into video games (!). And the EA developers found making games for those who wanted ‘play and fun’ to be ‘challenging’.

And then EA keeps whining and complaining about Wii Sports. “How dare we compete against a launch game bundled with the system?”

Remember this game called ‘Super Mario Brothers’? Third parties competed very well against it with their own platformers. Contra, Mega Man, Castlevania, among others. Sonic the Hedgehog and Bonk.

The truth is that EA doesn’t know how to compete and isn’t used to it.

Due to licensing, EA has a monopoly on sports games. EA doesn’t want to compete. EA also want sports games to follow the ‘high production model’ because no one can compete against millions of dollars in graphical visuals. No one can compete using national sports channels since only EA gets to do it.