Sega VP of Marketing Sean Ratcliffe hopes that Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games will "exceed the original," says House of the Dead: Overkill has met expectations, thinks that MadWorld could b
Based on the interview Sean Ratcliffe gave Venture Beat, the ongoing success of Sega's Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games franchise requires keeping a lot of people happy. "It's quite a long list of people who are involved in making that game," explained Sega of America's Vice President of Marketing, "from the IOC (International Olympic Committee) to ISM (International Sports Multimedia) to Nintendo to Sega." And of course, he acknowledged the single most crucial group of all: "Are consumers happy with it?"
The answer must be a resounding yes. The first game, Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games, has accumulated 10 million units sold worldwide since its release over a year ago near the end of 2007. Sega has noted that their sports games tend to do relatively better in the European market compared to America, but in both markets Mario & Sonic performed "incredibly well."
Obviously, the company is hoping that the sequel, Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games, will "exceed the original." Like the first game, this game will involve Nintendo's master designer Shigeru Miyamoto, and feature mascots and characters from both legendary gaming companies. It will also include new features, like balance board support and four-player cooperative gameplay. Ratcliffe has an additional reason to think the sequel will do well, saying that he thinks "the events of the Winter Olympics are actually more relevant to gaming" with sports like snowboarding, downhill skiing, bobsledding, and speed skating. However, the DS version of the game won't be able to take advantage of any of the recently released Nintendo DSi's new features since the development team "was already deep into the development cycle" when that possibility came up.
But what about Sega's other offerings on the Wii, like the recent Mature-rated titles House of the Dead: Overkill and MadWorld? According to Ratcliffe, Overkill "has done very well and has absolutely met our expectations" and describes the initial data for MadWorld as "very encouraging." He says that if the brawler from developer Platinum Games resonates with consumers, they would "absolutely want to make [MadWorld] into a franchise."
Talking about Sega's general place among the Wii's third parties, Ratcliffe boasted that his company was "confident about that platform right from the start" while "a number of [other] publishers were less so." In fact, he claimed that "Sega does incredibly well with a lot of its games on the Wii platform." Beyond that, he claimed that the company had taken the view that "the audience for the Wii fits firmly in the heartland of Sega's consumer base."
Ratcliffe also considered the company's plans for Nintendo's newly released DSi hardware and whether that would change their approach with DS games. "You probably have to believe that ultimately the DSi is going to be the platform that continues and the DS will probably die out," admitted Ratcliffe. Still, he didn't think it likely that Sega would need to change course drastically. "Nintendo platforms tend to have a long tail," he pointed out. "It took Game Boy years before it completely died out." Ratcliffe imagined that they'd work on "incorporating functionality for the DSi" for "key titles," but that Sega would cater to the previous DS and DS Lite audiences "for a long time."
Ratcliffe had more thoughts on the DSi and the future of the Mario & Sonic franchise, so be sure to read the full interview.
