Speaking in a recent 1UP podcast Sega studio director Constantine Hantzopoulos discussed the performance of the company’s Mature rated Wii games and said that Sega is now less likely to release titles similar to MadWorld and House Of The Dead: Overkill on the platform.
“I have to say that it was a space that was open and we took a gamble on it,” he said (via NeoGaf). “We did some research, it said there was an audience out there. I won’t 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 you’re seeing kids are skewing much younger towards next-gen.”
Hantzopoulos continued, “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 they’re both doing okay and at the end of the day we’ll make our numbers, that’s good. Conduit’s done quite well for us. It’s been slow burn. That’s the other thing you find out about the Wii. It’s not necessarily first three weeks like most titles. And DS. It’s a longer burn, actually.
“But that begs the question, are we going to do more mature titles for the Wii? And it’s like, probably not. Look at Dead Space. We were stunned. That was my litmus test. Basically, it’s 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 I’m like, ‘Woah'.”
Dead Space Extraction sold 9,000 copies in the US between its release on September 29 and the end of the NPD’s monthly reporting period on October.