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Ubisoft's Red Steel 2, sequel to the underwhelming launch title, mastered the art of sword and gunplay and has garnered positive reviews since its release (80 on Metacritic) but never sold even half of what its predecessor did. What went wrong?

Jason Vandenbergite, the game's creative director, shared his thoughts on the game's failure in a talk at the Game Developer's Conference Europe, going into detail on the main problem that Ubisoft faced with the sequel. Essentially, anybody who wanted to play Red Steel 2 needed to own a Wii, the Motion Plus add-on and also needed to both want to move around while playing games and had to have an interest in first person shooters.

Vandenbergite also went on to express disappointment in the original game, some of which undoubtedly contributed to the sequel's performance, as well as the mismatch in console target audiences and the fact that the game missed the holiday release window. He also mentioned that only around ten or twenty percent of Wii owners would even have the Motion Plus and that not everybody would want to play a game that required so much movement, saying, "No higher than 20 percent of gamers want to exert themselves."

Adding to the Red Steel team's woes is the fact that Wii Sports Resort sold 16,747,716 copies, while Red Steel 2 only managed 270,000 since its March release. Vandenbergite said that he would have been thrilled to have even ten percent of those sales (1.6 million). He then summarised the pros of Red Steel 2 (enthusiastic Red Steel fanbase, great pre-release buzz from press, the team was able to innovate with motion controls, it didn't suck, it had Nintendo's support) and the cons (only available on a single platform, piracy - no details on what he meant - the hardcore audience is on 360/PS3, there is lingering disappointment about the first Red Steel, it missed its holiday release window).

Vandenbergite concluded by informing all those developers in the audience working on a motion controlled game that, 'We're fucked.'

Although he did follow that up by mentioning that if the next generation includes motion controls as standard, then there might yet be hope for developers.

Thanks, IGN

 

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