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More mature Wii games from SEGA unlikely

Publisher "stunned" by poor sales of EA's Dead Space title

SEGA is unlikely to follow up MadWorld and House of the Dead: Overkill with further mature Wii titles according to studio director Constantine Hantzopoulos following the poor performance of EA's Dead Space Extraction at retail.

Despite both SEGA titles meeting sales targets, Hantzopoulos indicated in an interview with the 1UP podcast the publisher is sceptical about releasing similar games in future.

"I have to say that it was a space that was open and we took a gamble on it," he said. "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.

"We put out some pretty decent content. I mean, House of the Dead: Overkill and MadWorld are great Wii games. 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?" Hantzopoulos continued. "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'."

According to NPD figures, Dead Space Extraction sold 9000 copies in the US between its release at the end of September and the end of the NPD's reporting period in October.

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