The head of Capcom’s French division says the company will focus on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in the future because core games just don’t perform very well on the Nintendo Wii.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one already: Antoine Seux, director general of Capcom in France, said in a recent interview that while the Wii remains an important system – and with three million units sold in December, it’s a hard point to argue – it’s the 360 and PS3 that his company is most interested in, because those are the consoles that hardcore gamers actually play.
Sales of the Wii-exclusive Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles were “not too bad, but… below what we hoped,” he told French site Gamekult (Google translated), and while Resident Evil 4 did well when it was released in June 2007, he attributed the success largely to the lack of competition at the time. “This year the Wii was very difficult with an oversupply [of games] and a gamer market that has radically changed,” he said. “We note that [core games] are selling less and less on the Wii, whether MadWorld or Dead Rising: Chop ‘Til You Drop, The House of the Dead: Overkill… scores were not extraordinary.”
The big sellers on the Wii these days are games like Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games and New Super Mario Bros. Wii, he said, and while “Wii loyalists” may have supported core gaming on the system a couple of years ago, these days that demographic has migrated to the Microsoft and Sony consoles. “The Wii is still an important part of sales, but growth is on those platforms,” he said. “The Wii console is very much a family commitment [and] rates relatively low. So for us, Capcom, the future is the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.”
If Seux’s comments sound familiar, it’s probably because they echo recent remarks made by Sega’s Constantine Hantzopoulos, who said earlier this week that Sega probably won’t make any more forays into core game development for the Wii. “Kids are skewing much younger toward next-gen,” he said. “Anyone past 12 years old is playing 360 and PS3 shooters.”
