MadWorld May Not Release in Japan… or Australia… or Germany

by Dan Landis on October 3, 2008 at 8:24 pm

Sega reps won’t be showing the extreme gore-fest MadWorld at this year’s Tokyo Game Show, mostly due to the fact that it may be too extremely gore-festy for Japanese audiences. The game is being developed with a western audience in mind and will only be evaluated for a release elsewhere if it becomes a hit.

Japan-based Platinum Games, developer of MadWorld, is said to be be working closely with the ESRB. They want to make the ESRB feel like “part of the process” and they “don’t want to surprise them”. Basically, they want the game to be as violent as possible and are pushing to see where the ESRB draws the line.

This level of violence obviously doesn’t go over well with those pussy censors in places like Australia and Germany, so those countries are not currently in the running to receive a localized retail release. Oddly, even Japan is not being targeted for some MadWorld action.

Platinum Games and Sega are mainly focused on making MadWorld a huge, bloody hit for the Wii when it releases in North America in March ‘09 and, depending on how successful it is, will consider releases in other countries sometime down the road.

Tough call on this one. Most Wii owners are the proverbial “casual gamers” like my sister and her 7-year-old, and I don’t see either one of them being a likely fan of the game. Sure, there are plenty of parent gamers out there that used their kids as a cover for buying a Wii, and maybe they would appreciate some intestine-ripping action, but people like me who think the game looks awesome, well… I don’t own a Wii.

What do you think? Even if MadWorld were a good game, would that be enough to get the numbers given it’s violent nature?

Source: MTV Multiplayer

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