Sega 'Probably Not' Doing More Mature Wii Titles

Of all third-party publishers on the Wii, Sega made the largest concerted effort to push original core IP on the system in 2009, with three major releases in House of the Dead: Overkill, MadWorld and The Conduit. While Sega West President and COO Mike Hayes was incredibly upbeat this past August about mature IP on the Wii, Sega of America studio director Constantine Hantzopoulos painted a different picture.

“It was a space that was open and we took a gamble on it. Like, 'Wow, there's no mature games on the Wii. Is there an audience out there?' and we did some research that said that there was an audience out there. I won't comment about Nintendo, they did champion The Conduit as, 'This is a Nintendo game' so I think they did OK by us," said Hantzopoulos on the 4 Guys 1UP podcast.

“At the end of the day, I think what you're seeing is that kids are skewing much younger towards next-gen and that's what I saw out of Conduit because it's not a bad game. Visually, it's appealing and great for High Voltage's first real effort as an indie developer creating their own IP and it was a good effort,” he said, and when asked about the audience he responded, “What we found was that everyone over the age of 12 was playing [Xbox] 360 shooters and at that point. You can't tell if it's a 13-year-old, but it's on the Wii so forget it, they're not interested in any techno-fetish aspect of look how great it looks on the Wii and we actually have HDR and it's like no one gives a s***.”

When the ongoing issue of spotty success for Wii titles not made by Nintendo was raised, Hantzopoulos addressed Sega's other core efforts. “Sega took a gamble, we put out some pretty decent content," he said. "I mean House of the Dead and MadWorld are great Wii games. They're both doing OK and at the end of the day we'll make our numbers and Conduit's done quite well for us and it's been slow burn. That's another thing you find out about the Wii, it's not necessarily first three weeks like the other consoles. It's a bit of a longer burn, like the DS, so we panicked at first but we did OK. But that begs the question, 'Are we going to do more mature titles for the Wii?' and it's like, 'probably not.' I mean, look at Dead Space, that was my litmus test. It was like, you've got EA who can put all the marketing muscle behind this established franchise that's scored quite well on 360 and PS3, they should be able to hit this out of the park. We get numbers aside from NPD, and I'm like, 'Woah.'"

It's like what we've been saying for a while about the Wii core market just not being there.