EA Chief Creative Officer Richard Hilleman

Lately, it seems Nintendo has received its fair share of disparaging remarks from EA representatives, along with unflattering comparisons to Apple. And now today, at D.I.C.E. Europe, came the one-two combo of an EA executive unflatteringly comparing Nintendo to Apple.

EA Chief Creative Officer Richard Hilleman spoke to an audience at the conference on how he believes an overload of demands from the console industry has led to an exodus of consumers toward mobile gaming innovations.

Hilleman made a point to honour Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto for his heavy influence on the means through which young players learned videogames. He shared his belief, however, that Miyamoto hasn’t been living up to his past potential in the last several years, leaving youth to turn to iOS touch devices for their first gaming experiences:

I thank Miyamoto for [his contributions to gaming]. But he's falling down on the job. And for the past 5 years that job has been taken over by a dead guy from Cupertino.

The “dead guy from Cupertino” so colloquially referred to is Steve Jobs, just so we’re all on the same page.

Hilleman also said that, while consumers may be turning towards mobile devices more often, the span of attention for each engagement is still much larger for consoles — 90 seconds for small devices compared to 2 hours for consoles, according to EA research:

Once I get your butt on a couch, I can get 2 hours for sure. That granularity means I cannot build the same game on every platform. I cannot build Battlefield on every platform.

It seems somewhat misleading to compare Miyamoto to Jobs. While both men are arguably visionaries, their individual fields, positions and talents seem to barely mirror each other.

You can see more of what Hilleman said during his talk at GamesIndustry International. Do you think any of his sentiments ring true? Let us know below.

[source gamesindustry.biz]