Dead Space: Extraction a watershed for mature Wii games?

Dr Jens Uwe Intat, European VP at Electronic Arts, has revealed to GamesIndustry.biz that the performance of forthcoming Visceral follow-up, Dead Space: Extraction, could influence the company's decision to create mature-content games on the Nintendo Wii in the future.

Speaking in an interview at Gamescom last month Intat explained his hypothesis that many Wii owners also own either an Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3, and that the tendency is for people to use the latter on adult-orientated titles.

"One of the explanations we have is that there's a lot of double ownership," he said. "So people having a Wii and a 360 and/or PS3. They're really playing different types of games on those two machines, and historically up to know we assume those people will have played the more mature content on the more high-tech machine.

"Dead Space: Extraction is going to be a very nice test of that hypothesis, because we're really building a game where the Wii version is very different to the Dead Space game on 360 and PS3, and we'll actually see whether we can reach more people with a) a great game and b) interesting content."

He went on to agree that therefore the publisher will know within six months if it's a genre that's worth developing for in the future.

"If that's not going to work, then obviously the whole proposal from our point of view at least of more mature games on the Wii just does not work," he added.

The full interview with Jens Uwe Intat is available on GamesIndustry.biz now.