Despite the fact the Japanese developer / publisher Sega Corporation published three high-profile titles aimed at a mature audience on the Nintendo Wii last year, Sega of America studio director Constantine Hantzopoulos recently responded to the question “Are [you] going to do more mature titles for the Wii?” by stating that the company will “probably not” publish games like Madworld, House of the Dead: Overkill and The Conduit in the future.
Though each of these received generally favorable critical reviews, none of them managed to move as many units as initially had been hoped. Hantzopoulos stated he saw Dead Space: Extraction, published by EA last year, as the game that would either prove or disprove the chances of mature-rated games achieving success on the Wii, as he believed that with the combination EA’s marketing power and the success of Dead Space on other platforms, EA should have been “able to hit this out of the park.” Unfortunately, Dead Space: Extraction failed to become a success.
Despite admitting that games released on the Nintendo Wii generally have a much longer shelf-life than games on other platforms, with sales continuing for several months after launch rather than just a few weeks, Hantzopoulos stated that “everyone over the age of 12 [is] playing 360 shooters”.
Well, SEGA should have done a better job at marketing, and that would have helped, hell, Nintendo should have helped them too.
No, Sega shouldn’t have tried to release games exclusively on a platform whose ownership is largely UNDER the age of 17.