On the latest edition of the 4 Guys 1UP podcast, Constantine Hantzopoulos, a studio director over at SEGA, had much to say about the state of mature Wii games. Hantzopoulos discussed a number of topics, including sales of MadWorld, House of the Dead: Overkill, and The Conduit. But most importantly, he talked about the possibility of creating mature games for the Wii in the future. According to Hantzopoulos, after seeing the performance of SEGAs mature titles and Dead Space Extraction, SEGA is now less likely to produce similar content for the platform.
I have to say that it was a space that was open and we took a gamble on it. Its like, Wow, theres 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 wont 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 youre seeing kids are skewing much younger towards next-gen. And thats what I saw out of Conduit. Because not a bad game, visually its appealing, right? AI wasnt that great. High Voltages first real effort as an indie developer, creating their own IP. And it was a good effort, right? And theres always Conduit 2, right?
Anyone past 12 years old was playing 360 and PS3 shooters. And at that point, you cant tell a 13 year-old, But its on the Wii. Forget it, you know? Thats not what they see or hear. Theyre 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
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 theyre both doing okay and at the end of the day well make our numbers, thats good. Conduits done quite well for us. Its been slow burn. Thats the other thing you find out about the Wii. Its not necessarily first 3 weeks like most titles. And DS. Its a longer burn, actually. So panicked at first, but its like okay.
But that begs the question, are we going to do more mature titles for the Wii? And its like, probably not. Look at Dead Space. We were stunned. That was my litmus test. Basically, its 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 Im like, Woah.
