The bad news continues to roll in for Nintendo’s embattled console, as today EA announced that the latest version of Madden won’t be released for the Wii U.
Madden NFL 25 has been suspiciously absent from the Wii U release calendar, and today EA made what many people already assumed official: the company currently has no plans to bring its popular football franchise to Nintendo’s latest console. In a statement issued today, the company gave the usual canned PR response to the situation:
“We will not be releasing a Wii U version of Madden NFL in 2013. However, we have a strong partnership with Nintendo and will continue to evaluate opportunities for delivering additional Madden NFL products for Nintendo fans in the future.”
This will be the first year since 1991 that a Madden game hasn’t been released on a Nintendo console: even during Nintendo’s relatively lean years during the N64 and Gamecube eras, EA made sure to release Madden on every year that each console was active. As previously reported, the Wii U is selling at a slower rate than even the Gamecube (which was previously Nintendo’s least popular console,) and the system has been losing third-party support as its sales situation grows more dire. I know it’s trendy to blame EA with everything that’s wrong in the industry (whether it makes sense or not,) but you can’t really blame them for this decision — third party titles have traditionally sold less on Nintendo consoles than they do on other platforms, and I imagine the Wii U’s poor sales have only compounded that problem.
