Mike Hayes, Sega Europe president and COO, has said low sales that affected big names last year were down to ”physically about the time you’ve got.”
With publishers packing in so many big games close around it becomes difficult to find ”enough time to actually play them all.” Hayes warns there’s likely to be less put out.
”This time around there’s definitely an oversupply of good games in the market from publishers,” he said, speaking with GamesIndustry.biz. ”I think that was very evident in the UK at Christmas when you had fantastic games coming out and selling great in the first week, maybe two, and then falling off a cliff.”
”We were fortunate, because we only had Football Manager and Mario & Sonic, so we weren’t bringing out any new IP - but speaking to friends at other publishers, they have been saying they were disappointed with sales, they were being quite open about it.”
He cautions that if publishers do opt to reduce their line-ups to help strengthen what they are choosing to bring out then new IPs are going to suffer, less risk will be taken and sequels could see a rise.
”The downside is that I think that publishers in general will reduce the number of titles that they’ll bring to market. Whether than means people will focus less on innovation and more on sequelisation of course is a big debate.”
”What we’re actually doing is getting rid of the bottom tier of titles that we were putting in to get an extra bit of market share, of money. We’re getting rid of those, and we’re going to focus on the biggest titles - but we do have a lot of new IP coming out. We’ve invested in things like MadWorld, for example, and we feel our line-up is good enough that we can take that,” noted Hayes.
”But I think a lot of other publishers, and EA have been quite open on this, will stop a lot of projects and cut back. Ultimately I think the number will go down, which will probably be less good for consumers.”
Any games you’ve snapped up during the release blitz only to realise you’ve barely adventured past the tutorial?