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 SEGA’s 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. It’s like, ‘Wow, there’s 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 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. And that’s what I saw out of Conduit. Because not a bad game, visually it’s appealing, right? AI wasn’t that great. High Voltage’s first real effort as an indie developer, creating their own IP. And it was a good effort, right? And there’s always Conduit 2, right? …Anyone past 12 years old was playing 360 and PS3 shooters. And at that point, you can’t tell a 13 year-old, ‘But it’s on the Wii.’ Forget it, you know? That’s not what they see or hear. They’re 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 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 3 weeks like most titles. And DS. It’s a longer burn, actually. So panicked at first, but it’s like okay.

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.’”

http://www.nintendoeverything.com/30445/

Except that EA didn't put any marketing muscle behind Dead Space, did they?

I don't blame them.

Ah, so when they were saying that they were happy with sales in the first weeks after those games, they were actually panicked.

Dead Space was his litmus test ? Isnt dead space an onrails shooter ? Wasnt most people pissed because of that ?

Eh, they tried I suppose. They licensed unproven developers and new studios to make games that people may or may not have wanted. They made a black and white world to immerse players in blood, in a world of 1080p. They released an uninspired FPS riddled with 90's stereotypes and an on-rail shooter that can be completed in a few hours with ease. But hey, they tried.

EA didn't invest on ads and apart from that.....they transform a PS3/X360 shooter into a on-rails game, it is more like to say that they downgraded the game beacause it was for the Wii.
And one last thing, Dead Space didn't sell like hotcakes on PS3/X360 either.

I wonder how sales for Dragon Quest X and Monster Hunter Tri will be worldwide, maybe then we can talk about mature/high budget/high quality 3rd party games sell on the Wii.

Didn't they say they pushed the hardware to the limit for these games?

Sounds like they tried to me.

Crappy development + Crappy Advertising + short game + not so popular franchise + not so popular genre == Crappy sales.

They have only themselves to blame.

As said EA didn't do jack in regards to marketing Dead Space Extraction. They did nothing at all to market the game to the masses. So how could they use that as a reason. It's the same thing so many others did. Conduit was at least marketed but it's ads were in horrible time slots and perhaps in all the wrong location as well. Not saying they had to be in prime time but they should have been during the day. On channels and at times where those teens and young adults would and could see them. Not at midnight on Adult Swim.