EA Sports head Peter Moore on using the Wii to promote sports games

When you’re intent on promoting sports video games to an evolving market, which console would you employ to help you out? For EA Sports, it would be the Nintendo Wii. The company is very much aware of the fact that older gamers and female gamers have flocked to the machine, and it’s hoping to work with that. More on the EA Sports initiative in the full article after the jump.

Veterans in any industry usually keep an eye out for emerging trends and how they can seize business opportunities. EA Sports is doing precisely that with its two-pronged initiative. It’s goal is to promote sports games through the making of customized titles for the Nintendo Wii and through the launching of the Freestyle sub-brand.

EA Sports is aware of the fact that the Nintendo Wii has caught on, especially with female gamers and older players. Drawing upon Wii Sports as a model, company head honcho Peter Moore spoke of taking advantage of available opportunities in the growing market:

We can’t be blind to the fact that different consumers are coming into games now and shame on us if we can’t evolve and develop something for that crowd.

We learned some hard lessons. That [Wii Sports] was the type of sports experience they were looking for and we saw that and decided we needed to redefine what our sports games were about.

Nevertheless, Moore said that EA Sports would not be dumbing down the sports experience for its core fans. He likened the new initiative to constructing a pool with both a deep end and a shallow end for different kinds of swimmers. As a kind of identifying mark, Wii sports games from EA Sports will have the words “All-Play” attached to their titles starting this year.

Finally, the sub-brand dubbed Freestyle will feature a new set of games not tied to any existing league. This means that there are no expensive licensing rights to pay for. The first title in this series will be the boxing game known as Facebreaker (PS3, Xbox 360, Wii).