At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as "crap" and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether.


"The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet," tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. "Nintendo are walking dead at this point."

Though the tweets, made early yesterday morning, have since been deleted, screenshots of them mushroomed across multiple sites, most prominently on NeoGAF.


Summerwill didn't let up after that first tweet. "Nintendo are still operating like it's 1990," he goes on, saying it should have gotten out of the hardware business and made its Mario and Legend of Zelda franchises exclusives on either the PlayStation 4 or next Xbox.

"Instead, they make this awful console," he added. Then, of EA's withdrawal from developing for Wii U, he said, "It is an utterly intentional decision to focus our resources on markets which actually matter."

Kotaku has attempted to contact Summerwill. An EA Sports spokesman at the publisher's headquarters gave this statement:

EA has a strong partnership and an active agreement with Nintendo to develop games for the WiiU. Last year we released Mass Effect 3 and several of our EA Sports titles on that platform. So far, we have not announced any new titles for Wii U this year, but that does not preclude more games in the future.


However, earlier this week, EA spokesman Jeff Brown confirmed to Kotaku that the company has zero games under development for Wii U. Later reports verified that means FIFA, one of the world's biggest selling games among all genres, will not release a version for the console this year. That goes for Madden NFL 25 as well, another enormous seller in North America.

Summerwill's comments recall another Twitter flap not long ago; in early April, Adam Orth, then a creative director for Microsoft, said that those with reservations about a console with an always-on requirement should just "deal with it." Microsoft later apologized for the remarks, and Orth is said to be no longer with the company.


EA Sports Engineer: Wii U is crap, < powerful than 360. No $ 3party. [NeoGAF, via GoNintendo]