Rock Band IS Coming To The Wii - EA Confirms
There have been rumours rumbling for months now about a version of Rock Band for the Nintendo Wii. Although Electronic Arts, who distributes the game for publisher MTV, wouldn’t confirm of deny the intense speculation, it seems EA’s chief executive John Riccitiello just couldn’t hold the news in any longer.
During a conference call discussing EA’s 3rd quarter financial results, he spilled the beans on what will be music (pun intended) to Wii owners ears, saying:
“In terms of pacing the next few quarters, you’re probably well aware of the more than $2.5 million music downloads that have occurred on Rock Band,”
“What’s probably the most interesting pieces right now is the coming launch on the Wii, the continued sale of the core platforms in North America, and then the fiscal ‘09 launch across Europe against all of the SKU.”
That seems pretty clear to me, and unless it’s a wind up of massive magnitude, I think a release on the Wii is almost guaranteed now.
There are obviously no further details present as of yet, including how the game would work, the control method it will use, a release date, and planned pricing strategy.
The Wii is a bit of a difficult one to call because the control method obviously already lends itself to games of this nature. I’m sure MTV and EA don’t want to miss out on the opportunity of extra peripheral sales, but surely an option to play just using the remote control and nunchuk accessories would be included?
Having said that, just getting the game on to the system, with it’s massive installed user base would increase sales of the game and success of the franchise quite considerably, meaning peripheral sales might not be necessary.
During the same question and answer session, it was revealed that 1.5 million copies of the game had been sold since it’s US release, and online consumers had bought over $2.5 million worth of downloadable content for the game.
[Source: Gamespot]
February 6th, 2008 at 6:05 pm
[...] chief executive John Riccitiello let news of an upcoming launch of Rock Band for the Wii slip during a conference call. That is all Riccitiello let slide. No word on a time [...]