14 DAY TRIAL // Peter Moore, the chief operations officer of publisher Electronic Arts, says that the joke that the official Frostbite 3 Twitter feed made about bringing the game engine to the Wii U home console from Nintendo was unacceptable and stupid.
The messages were widely reported before they were taken down and deleted.
The executive has apologized via his own Twitter feed to all fans of the company who were distressed by the messages and to the partners at Nintendo of America and says that an internal investigation is launched in order to make sure that such incidents do not happen in the future.
He also makes it clear that the leadership of Electronic Arts has not condoned the series of messages and that the company would never send out a message that can affect decisions made by its fans.
It’s unclear whether the company plans to discipline DICE as a studio in any way or if the man behind the official Twitter feed for Frostbite is the only one who will be affected by the unfortunate attempt at an April Fools’ gag.
The announcement that Frostbite 3 was set to launch on the Wii U from Nintendo was disparaging to the home console, which is widely known to be less powerful than the rival PlayStation 4 from Sony and the Xbox One from Microsoft.
Since it was launched, the platform has failed to generate the sales that were expected of it and Nintendo has been forced to acknowledge that it will sell about 2.8 million units all over the world for the fiscal year that will end on March 31, down from an original estimate of 9 million.
Since they were launched in November of last year, the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4 have managed to sell more than 3 million and, respectively, 6 million devices.
Frostbite 3 is an ambitious piece of tech, created by DICE, which will be used to power a variety of Electronic Arts published video games in the coming years.
It has been used in Battlefield 4, creating its unique Levolution mechanics, and BioWare is also employing Frostbite 3 to create Dragon Age: Inquisition, which is set to be launched in the fall of this year and looks stunning judging from screenshots.
The same technology might also be used in the future to power the Star Wars themed video games that Electronic Arts is set to reveal soon and which will come out starting next year.
Our apologies to partners @NintendoAmerica & fan @FrostbiteEngine ’s poor attempt at April Fools not condoned by EA : unacceptable/ stupid
— Peter Moore (@petermooreEA) April 1, 2014