SEGA Talk No More Mature Game Support On Wii

On the latest 1Up podcast, SEGA studio director – Constantine Hantzopoulos, was very open about his companies stance on mature Wii titles.

With the dissappointment of low sales for ‘The House Of Dead: Overkill‘ and ‘Madworld‘ in 2009 followed up with underwhelming sales of EA’s ‘Dead Space: Extraction‘, it seems the end of support from SEGA for this type of content has been confirmed, even though in the past SEGA pledged they would continue support, it seems sales of EA’s shooter was the final nail in the coffin.

“I have to say that it was a space that was open and we took a gamble on it. 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. I won’t comment about Nintendo, they did champion The Conduit as a ‘this is a Nintendo game.’ And, you know, I think they did okay by us. 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…”

More after the jump…

“…Circling back to the whole mature Wii thing, again SEGA took a gamble, we put out some pretty decent content. I mean, House of the Dead: Overkill and MadWorld are great Wii games. They really are, especially House of the Dead: Overkill. That game is funny…Yes [it did better than MadWorld]. I mean they’re both doing okay and at the end of the day we’ll make our numbers, that’s good. 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.

But that begs the question, 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.’”

It’s a great shame that the SEGA and High Voltage games have not sold more than they did. It seems like the Wii is destined for even more shovelware! Let’s hope ‘The Grinder‘ performs better.

Thanks 1Up