SEGA expresses reluctance towards new mature games on Wii
A studio director from the company discusses the sales figures of this years hardcore efforts on the console in a podcast interview
Constantine Hantzopoulos, the studio director, first explained why SEGA became interested in the these sorts of titles to begin with.
“I have to say that it was a space that was open and we took a gamble on it," says Hantzopoulos. "It’s like, ‘Wow, there’s no mature games on the Wii. Is there an audience out there?’ We did some research, it said there was an audience out there.”
While he says Nintendo were good to them, it was really the trend in the gaming population towards more flashy systems that was the largest negative factor.
“At the end of the day, I just think that you’re seeing kids are skewing much younger towards next-gen. And that’s what I saw out of Conduit. Because not a bad game, visually it’s appealing, right? AI wasn’t that great. High Voltage’s first real effort as an indie developer, creating their own IP. And it was a good effort, right? And there’s always Conduit 2, right? …Anyone past 12 years old was playing 360 and PS3 shooters. And at that point, you can’t tell a 13 year-old, ‘But it’s on the Wii.’ Forget it, you know? That’s not what they see or hear. They’re not really interested in any techno-fetishist aspects of look how great it is on the Wii…And, you know, the effort that we put behind multiplayer on that game to basically get by friend codes and provide worldwide match-making and so on and so forth, I actually thought we dove too deep…”
The thing is, though, that out of all of SEGAs titles, The Conduit seems to have performed the best, with MadWorld and House of the Dead: Overkill still doing okay.
“I mean [House of the Dead: Overkill and MadWorld are] both doing okay and at the end of the day we’ll make our numbers, that’s good," he clarifies. "Conduit’s done quite well for us. It’s been slow burn. That’s the other thing you find out about the Wii. It’s not necessarily first 3 weeks like most titles. And DS. It’s a longer burn, actually. So panicked at first, but it’s like okay.”
After that positive note, however, Hantzopoulos proceeded to give us some very worrying thoughts from the company about their future plans.
"But that begs the question," he says, "are we going to do more mature titles for the Wii? And it’s like, probably not. Look at Dead Space. We were stunned. That was my litmus test. Basically, it’s like, okay, you got EA, who can put all the marketing muscle behind this, an established franchise that scored quite well on 360 and PS3. They should be able to actually hit this out of the park, right? We get numbers, real numbers aside from NPD, and I’m like, ‘Woah.’"
As one of the frontrunners for mature games on Wii, SEGA potentially pulling out from these sorts of games doesnt set the best of examples for other publishers. Hopefully Ubisoft and Capcom will have better luck with their lineups this year.
Source: 4 Guys 1UP Podcast via Nintendo Everything
