There’s been a bit of bubbapalooza the past couple of days concerning Wii games and how the more mature ones are faring on the shelves of your local Gamestop (short answer: they’re not). If you needed a bigger hint than that, Sega have decided they’re not making any more grown-up Wii games following the disastrous flops of both Madworld (which, in retrospect, even Havok didn’t like) and The Conduit.

Capcom have been lending their own weight to the situation too since on-rails zombie romp Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles monumentally failed to gather any sales momentum whatsoever. I think it was down to the developers ignoring my excellent advice on bonus features, to be honest.

Anyway. Stepping into the foray, the UK’s Official Nintendo Magazine got right under my skin. Because they got the situation so so wrong.

Writing on their blog, the magazine reasoned that games like Darkside Chronicles and House of the Dead flopped because the Wii is at saturation point when it comes to on-rails shooters. Madworld failed because it was bordering on insane in concept, and The Conduit sucked harder than a vacuum cleaner and hence didn’t sell as many copies as a game of quality would.

If genre saturation was a real issue here, then nobody would buy Modern Warfare 2, Left 4 Dead 2 or any of the other decent shooters we’ve had landing on our doorsteps lately, because there’s just so many shooting games out there that we’re obviously bored of them. Or not. Darkside Chronicles and company are released on the Wii, and the Call of Duty crowds can be found mostly gathered around PS3s and Xbox 360s.

And pleading insanity, Madworld? Two words for you: Viewtiful Joe. That did well enough to warrant sequels. On the console that failed almost as hard as the Dreamcast. The blog post even tried to defend the Gamecube’s past track record of third-party games, without mentioning that most of the games used in the example (Burnout, TimeSplitters, Soulcalibur) were on other platforms too and did much better on them too.

Look, it doesn’t matter whether or not the game is rubbish, or if the genre is saturated or blahblahblah. The fact of the matter is that, whether or not you like the stereotype, nobody buys a Wii for its selection of mature games. Sega claimed that Madworld emerged from audience research which said that people would buy and enjoy a game like it if it were released on the Wii. To be honest, who actually follows through anything they say in most research surveys anyway?

It doesn’t take a genius to work out that people seeking a “grown-up” gaming experience don’t go for the Wii. They avoid the console that only ever advertises Wii Sports, talking to friends on Animal Crossing and Wii Fit being played by B-list TV celebrities (at least in the UK). Call it brash, and call it stereotyped, but they’ll follow the internet hype around the Next Big Thing on the other consoles and they’ll go out and buy it at their nearest gaming store, and more often than not it’ll be slapped with a big M for Mature sticker in the corner.

People don’t buy a Wii for its mature content and this is why Madworld and co. didn’t do as well as they might have deserved to. The audience is just not interested – even if they lie to Sega and say they are. In fact, especially then.

Yeah.