EA Still On The Fence About Its Future With Nintendo Switch

Since announcing the Switch, Nintendo has promised gamers that third-party publishers would support the console. However, EA plans to wait a little longer to decide how to support Nintendo’s hybrid console.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal published Tuesday, EA’s finance chief Blake Jorgensen told the publication the company plans to wait until the Switch has on the market for a full year before deciding whether to release more games for the console.

Currently, FIFA 18 is the only title EA has published for the Nintendo Switch (released in September). Jorgensen said that it’s hard to judge the success of the game on the Switch and wants “to fully understand what the demand is,” for the console before committing more resources to the platform.

This statement comes at an odd time, after Nintendo released quarterly earnings revealing the company tripled its revenue from this time last year thanks to the Switch, which has sold almost 8 million units to date. Nintendo expects to sell over 14 million consoles worldwide by the end of March.

Third-party skepticism of Nintendo consoles is nothing new. It’s partially to blame for the Wii U’s failure, but considering the Switch has sold so many units and is being received well by gamers, it’s definitely short-sighted to not want to get in on this growing audience.

Capcom took some heat when its CEO commented that the sales performance of Ultra Street Fighter II would help the company evaluate its support of the console moving forward.

Nintendo understands the importance of third-party games and has a ton of them coming for the 2017 holiday season alone, including Skyrim, Doom and WWE 2K18.

Whether EA decides to support the Switch will definitely depend upon Nintendo’s ability to sell the 14 million units it promises. But even after the great start to the Switch’s lifecycle, EA may have already made up its mind. Let’s hope that’s not the case.