14 DAY TRIAL // SEGA has been something of a pioneer. As other publishers were busy offering stripped down, colorful and easy to understand experiences on the Nintendo Wii home gaming console, which has the biggest installed base of the current generation, the publisher released two mature, violent and complex games, MadWorld and House of the Dead: Overkill. Both videogames are well adapted to motion tracking controls and their looks were better than expected for the Wii, yet they failed to sell very well.
Now, SEGA seems determined not to push forward with mature titles for the Nintendo gaming gadget, mainly because of the limited impact of Dead Space: Extraction, which was released by Electronic Arts in September 2009.
Constantine Hantzopoulos, who is the studio director at SEGA, told 1UP that “That was my litmus test. Basically... 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?” The fact that the game only managed to sell about 10,000 units in one month is a clear sign that dark and mature experiences are not well suited to the Nintendo Wii.
SEGA did research, which showed that there was an audience for games like House of the Dead, MadWorld and even The Conduit and these titles are set to actually sell a respectable number over the long term. Unfortunately, the Wii does not seem to have the potential to sustain mature blockbusters that sell millions of units in the first days after launch.
So, SEGA will probably approach the Nintendo platform in the coming year by putting out more games like Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games and by targeting the platform for licensed titles, like the upcoming experience based on the Iron Man 2 movie.