During a conference call with investors earlier this week, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot stated that expectations for the upcoming Wii-FPS Red Steel 2 have been halved. Though the game was initially expected to sell approximately one million units, these expectations are now lowered to 500.000 units.
In recent weeks, major third party publishers such as Sega and Capcom have stated they will shift focus away from the Wii’s ‘core’ segment, as games aimed at these demographics have consistently failed to achieve mainstream success despite positive critical reviews. Ubisoft has not made a statement as to whether or not it intends to continue developing games for the ‘core’ segment of the Nintendo Wii userbase.
Red Steel 2 will release in March 2010 and will be bundled with the Wii Motion Plus extender for the Wii Remote. Red Steel 2 has been specifically designed to make use of the increased accuracy of the Wii Motion Plus.
Probably another big piece is that it missed Holiday 2009. Bad news for gamers folks
Well, what do you expect when you push the game out of its original release window, hype for the game is lost, Ubisoft did this to themselves. I want to see how it does, it still looks to be WAY better than the original.
I think this is an overall bad sign though… as a rule of thumb, ‘regular’ games without excessive budgets on next-gen consoles need around 1 million copies to break even. On the Wii, the average game needs about 400.000 copies to break even. I don’t think we can class Red Steel as an ‘average’ game and therefore, I don’t think this will even break even at the 500k target… if they even achieve THAT…