Industry Gamers has some
interesting quotes from
Sega West president Mike Hayes. Hayes says that the Wii is still important to them for core-oriented games and that comments made late last year by Sega America people are a little off. In fact he said he told the European press to ignore those comments entirely. This is intriguing, because after games like Madworld and The Conduit failed to ship huge numbers in their first month, Sega America said they were basically cutting and running in terms of core Wii software. After remembering those comments, I admit to being surprised when Sega announced it was publishing Conduit 2.
Hayes wants to clarify that Sega isn't shifting the focus away from core gamers entirely, just going for a broader approach. In my opinion this is what publishers, including Nintendo, should have done from the start--make the Wii an
everybody machine with all kinds of weird and creative games, like the DS or even the Dreamcast. Conversely, a core game doesn't necessarily have to be
hardcore like Madworld or GTA; in fact I'm pretty sick of the term hardcore altogether. Games like
Zack and Wiki,
Red Steel 2 and even the upcoming
Trauma Team are what you'd call core games--they have depth, they aren't bonehead simple like the heaps of party game collections, but they aren't drenched top-to-bottom in blood and gore either.
I like Hayes' approach a lot. When publishers stop branding the Wii as a casual platform or a minigame platform or what-have-you, they can just focus on putting out good games for it. That kind of pigeon-holing really dampened the Wii's potential for innovative software during the first few years of its life, with Nintendo leading the crowd. With Nintendo bringing a lot more core focused games out this year it looks like they're trying to turn things around--can Sega contribute to making the platform viable again too? Let us know what you think about this sticky issue in the comments.
