Gamespot interviews Sega’s Simon Jeffrey

A really interesting interview with Simon Jeffrey of Sega. He’s also on the ESA Board, and GS asks him all kinds of questions about E3 as well.

GS: Now, what’s going on with the Wii Virtual Console. Are you guys pleased with how your titles are selling on that?

SJ: Yeah, we’re very pleased about how that’s been going. We believe that there’s a big marketplace for the industry moving forward on all three of the major platforms for revisiting old content, and also for just simple $5 downloads, as Xbox Live Arcade is proving. It’s a really cool time to be doing new stuff in the industry and with the next-gen games costing so much to develop and the risk associated with that being so high, it’s actually nice to have the balance of handheld games with lower budgets and also games that are delivered by consoles online.

GS: And in terms of those big budgets, there’s been a lot of talk about how a lot of people are now shifting resources as they develop for the Wii, because it’s cheaper to develop for. Is Sega revisiting how it originally allocated its own development efforts and shifting over to the Wii more than it was before?

SJ: Well, I think we saw the Wii success coming before anyone else did. It was actually two E3s ago when everyone else was writing off Nintendo as being way behind PlayStation 3 and 360. And Sega was going, “Ah, man, this is really smart.” They positioned themselves in a totally different way and pulled out of the technology arms race, and they’re just going for fun and creativity. And how cool is that?

So, we went early on the Wii with Sonic, and since Monkey Ball did really well, we’ve got a bunch of Wii games coming out. Obviously, Sonic and Mario at the Olympics has been in development and in planning for quite some time. We’ve got NiGHTS and Ghost Squad coming out on the Wii this holiday season. So, a lot of Wii-specific stuff has been in the pipeline for us for quite some time. So, we look at what everyone else is doing, and we see they’re just rushing developments to the Wii without really taking absolute advantage of what the Wii has to offer. We don’t think it’s going to be of any benefit to anyone in the long run. So, we’re still pretty much sticking to our guns, we’re still balancing our portfolio. We’re having a bunch of fun Wii stuff, but we’re keeping the PlayStation 3 and 360 developments going as well for the higher end part of the market.

I can definitely admire Sega for not jumping on the bandwagon. They really did support the Wii before it was the cool thing to do. Kudos Simon.

I highly recommend reading the entire interview over at gamespot.

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