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Silent Hill Dev Questions Success Of Hardcore Wii Games
This past Tuesday Silent Hill: Shattered Memories hit the Nintendo Wii. Rated Mature, the game is another addition to the Wii’s small hardcore title catalog. A category known to be less-than-lucrative. The CEO of Shattered Memories developer Climax Studios has spoken out saying that the hardcore demographic is a hard one to develop for on the Wii.
In a recent discussion with Develop, Simon Gardner explained that maximizing the Wii’s less-than-top end technology was not as much of a challenge as predicting the game’s reception by Nintendo’s user base.
“We feel we now understand the hardware and the interface very well,” said Gardner. “But the flip-side to that is that non-Nintendo publishers feel they haven’t done that well on it commercially.
“That’s the biggest issue. From that perspective the Wii is a really difficult device to develop for, because as a hardcore games machine, Wii games are always going to be held up against whatever’s just come out on the Xbox 360 or PS3.”
Gardner also expressed that he’s getting tired of the “unflattering comparisons” between Wii games and the PS3 or 360. He also cites the Wii’s low attachment rate as reason why the system is so hard to reign in a successful hardcore game. He claims people simply aren’t buying new games.
When questioned about the predicted success of Shattered Memories compared to the struggle of other hardcore games, Gardner responded saying Climax is uncertain “if hardcore games can succeed on the Wii.
“With Silent Hill Shattered Memories, we’ve made a gamer’s game, and we’ve put a lot of passion into the game to get it right. But we’ve now got to wait and see how successful it’s really going to be commercially. That’s kind of out of our hands.”
If you haven’t yet seen our take on the Wii reinvention of the first Silent Hill, you should check out our review here. With all this in mind, do you think Gardner has anything to be worried about?
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