EA may have turned away from Wii U development due to a lack of hardware sales momentum, but their reasons for largely ignoring the 3DS are less clear.
FIFA 15 may be headed to the handheld, but outside of the annual football title the third-party publisher is largely absent from the release schedule.
EA COO Peter Moore has chimed in, reasoning that they have “finite resources” and their teams see smart devices as where consumers will be spending the gaming time years down the line. It’s future planning apparently, and EA don’t believe that the 3DS will be around on “a scale level” by FY 2017 or 2018.
Moore shared his own explanation with GamesIndustry International: “We were supportive of both of those platforms, but then you’ve got finite resources and you’ve got teams that say, ‘We really think that two or three years from now, these are the platforms that people are going to be consuming games on.’ And you look at the quality of what you can do on phones and tablets…
“Sometimes strategy is not about what you do but what you don’t do, and you have to make some hard calls when you’ve got only so many people. To my point, we’ve got to be planning for FY 17 and 18. Do you think the Vita and 3DS are going to be around in some shape or fashion by then on a scale level?”
EA’s Peter Moore explains their minimal 3DS support
