Nintendo Wii Fanboy

EA Sports' new "Freestyle" brand will feature more casual sports games than the Madden-type stuff found under the main EA Sports brand -- think EA Sports BIG, but in 2008. The first game to come out under the brand will be FaceBreaker, the cartoony boxing game.

EA Sports president Peter Moore has already revealed a second Freestyle game, though an official announcement has yet to be made. The new exercise game will support Nintendo's Balance Board peripheral in much the same way that Wii Fit does.

To differentiate between Wii Fit and the new project, Moore describes a "Western," cardiovascular style of exercise, as opposed to the tai-chi-like anaerobic "holistic fitness" in Wii Fit. Which sounds like a great idea.

If you're in the gaming industry on the development end, odds are you've had plenty of meetings talking about the success of the Wii platform and how your company needs to get its own slice of the pie (well, unless you're Epic). EA has decided that they want a fairly decent slice of that pie, and are doing so with special Wii versions of their sports games. EA expects that sales of its sports games will account for $1.3 billion in its fiscal year (which just ended in March), coming to a third of their total revenue.

The model for them (like others) has been Wii Sports. Peter Moore, head of EA Sports, commented that EA has "no intention whatsoever of dumbing down the experience that we all love and that drives this multibillion dollar business ... we need to make sports games more approachable." He then comments how Wii Sports became so popular "and we saw that and decided we needed to redefine what our sports games were about." These new accessible Wii versions of EA's popular sports games will have an "All-Play" label attached. Moore explains it as "like how swimming pools have a deep end and a shallow end. EA Sports has really only built a swimming pool with a deep end. It's intimidating for a lot of people to jump right in the deep end. With All-Play, we're building a shallow end."

Maybe with all this Wii support, Reggie will finally send Peter one.

It looks like 2007's Ubisoft has turned into 2008's EA, as the latter has a slew of new titles lined up for the Wii. And in supporting the console much as Ubisoft did during the launch, we're wondering if EA has some actual quality products lined up for us, or if this is going to turn into just another opportunity for someone to shovelware or port us to death.

With eight new games lined up by the company, EA Sports also has a new IP planned for the console. Electronic Arts wants their own slice of that delicious casual pie, as EA head honcho Peter Moore comments "we now have eight titles in development for the Wii, testament both to the global impact of that console currently in the global marketplace, as well as to our desire to attract more consumers to experience EA Sports games, no matter their experience playing games nor their prowess with a traditional controller."

So, are you excited? Still hate EA? What games do you think we're getting? What's your opinion regarding all of this?