Sega Nerds

Sega hoping to open up a new market for the Wii

Posted by Graham. Filed under Europe, G, Interviews, News, Nintendo Wii. Tagged with Darren Williams, House of the Dead Overkill, MadWorld.

~Generic Wii image~

In an interview with GamesIndustry.biz Darren Williams, head of content at Sega A&R, spoke a little of his feelings towards the Wii and how Sega hopes to (effectively) create a new market in the console’s games library.

When asked if he thought the Wii was a good starting point for new gamers and if the gamers would then move on to the true next gen consoles (360 and PS3), Darren had this to say:

“I think on one hand the Wii has become the most expensive board game on Earth - it’s the kind of thing that families will play at Christmas, and probably won’t play again throughout the remainder of the year. So things like Wii Sports, Wii Fit to a certain extent, that’s great.”

Seems that someone has noticed that a lot of gamers don’t play on their Wiis that often - which is something I see mentioned all over the Internet.  I have even found myself hardly touching my Wii of late.  Darren goes on to say on how he thinks Sega will help correct this situation:

“Your point about a gateway, an entry point to gaming - certainly I think the Wii needs to have more titles. We’ve got two at Sega, but we’re backing to attract us to the slightly older thirty-somethings that might hit nostalgia, and they’ll feel they want to play House of the Dead: Overkill, and we’ve also got MadWorld. So we believe that the market is there and needs to be served. It’s risky because new markets don’t exist unless somebody goes to make them, so that’s what we’re backing.”

Which is all a good thing.  Even though the Wii does have some very good games on it, it just doesn’t seem to have enough good ’standard’ titles which you might find on other systems. 

Annoyingly I have seen this interview miss-quoted on a couple of sites now, with people saying how Sega thinks the Wii is “an expensive board game” but the company is still willing to make money by putting games out for it. 

Perhaps I’m the one who is misinterpreting this, but it sounds to me that Darren is saying that Sega is looking to fix this situation with the likes of MADWORLD and House of the Dead.  By shying away from the party games and mediocre titles, we see for the system, they are hoping to open up the software market for the console and get gamers playing on the system more.

Well you can decide for yourselves, check out the full interview, here.

[Source: GameIndustry.biz]