Theme Park DS and SimCity DS go overboard
EA drops in-house development but says games will still be released
How hard can it be to port PC games to DS? Well, if the travails of EA's Japanese development office are anything to go by, it's one of those things that's harder than it looks.
It was only in December that Jon Niermann, president of EA's Asia publishing division was buffing up the studio. "We are in a unique position to develop compelling new games that appeal to consumers worldwide, by combining EA's proven global IP with the expertise of EA Japan Studio in the NDS platform," he crowed.
Presumably, the ex-employees of the studio will now be asking him for similarly suitably impressive references, given that EA Japan has reportedly shut down its development studio and signed up external developers to finish the work on games such as Theme Park DS, SimCity DS and Dragon Zakura.
A spokesman for EA said it would still release the games, although it's not clear if the re-organisation will affect release dates.
Ironically though, EA has also just released some new screens for Theme Park DS, which was due to be released in March. There's no European release date yet set for SimCity DS.
