Tag Archives: Mike Hayes

SEGA West president Mike Hayes has said, once again that the titles it’s working on for Natal and Move would be revealed at E3 and that the projects will appeal to a specific type of player.

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Head of Sega in the west Mike Hayes has said Madworld was a “mismatch” on Wii.

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Sega president Mike Hayes has revealed the company is very much keen on doing a sequel to Bayonetta.

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Sega boss Mike Hayes has revealed the company will show off a Project Natal “prototype” at E3 this coming June, with more in the pipeline.

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SEGA has said that it will no longer permit it’s classic IPs to be used in sub-par games as it tries to gain popularity on PS3 and Xbox 360.

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Sega’s gearing up to announce Natal and PS3 motion tech games, Sega West boss Mike Hayes has told IndustryGamers.

“We’d like to think that in early 2010 we’ll be making announcements about both of those platforms,” he said.

Hayes added that the projects right now are basically in an R&D phase.

“We have our ideas and we know what we want to do, but the technology is pretty new, particularly with Natal, so we’ve got to get to grips with the technology and see if it can do what we want it do,” he said, adding about the experimentation, “I kind of think of it as the land of bunsen burners and test tubes.”

More through there. Thanks, Destructoid.

Sega President and COO Mike Hayes has said that the company will back more hardcore games, despite the lackluster sales of Platinum’s MadWorld.

Speaking with Wired, Hayes stated that Sega is also still researching why it flopped at retail.

“It’s difficult because it was a critically acclaimed title; it was extreme but good,” he said. “The thing that we’re saying is, Sega would be extremely arrogant to have a title that didn’t do as well as we thought on a platform and then say, “Those kind of games don’t sell on that platform.” I think if you take our slew of more mature games — House of the Dead Overkill did really well in Europe, and for some reason even though it’s a big (intellectual property) it did less well in North America.

“So that’s kind of like a win and a miss that’s kind of come out neutral.

“MadWorld sales were very disappointing, but was that to do with the platform? Was it that people didn’t like the art style? Or that people didn’t like the way the game played through? It could be many things, which we’re obviously researching.

“What we can say is that we’ll still do mature games for the Wii market because with an install base of some 34 million in Europe and America.

“So I think the sheer scale of the Wii allows a shooter, or a mature game, to be a niche but a successful niche. And because the development costs can be less on Wii, that means you can sell less to be successful…. We can take more risks on the Wii.”

Loads more through the link.

Thanks, GoNintendo.

Sega has announced that Naoya Tsurumi will assume worldwide responsibility for Sega’s Consumer Business, which includes Sega of America, Europe and Japan.

In addition, Mike Hayes, the president of European operations, has been promoted to the newly created position of President & COO of both Sega of America and Sega of Europe, reporting directly to Tsurumi.

This new role aligns the two Western markets and “ensures more aggressive collaboration across these growing territories in operations and product development.”

Sega’s announcement comes on the heels of president Simon Jeffery, hanging up his hat to “pursue other interests” with iPhone publisher ngmoco.

More job descriptions and the like are posted in the press release below.

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Sega Europe COO Mike Hayes has been promoted to president of Sega of America, GI reports.

Simon Jeffery stepped down from the position yesterday, to take on a new role at iPhone publisher ngmoco.

In response to Splash Damage studio director Paul Wedgwood’s claims that Metacritic pressure on devs was “ridiculous,” Sega Europe president Mike Hayes said that reckons Metacritic provides “objectivity into the business.”

Hayes added the caveat that the meta-review site needs to be used sensibly, however, if factored into future developer deals.

“The first thing is that we’re always trying to put objectivity into the business,” he told GI. “We’re a creative business, and how do you put objectivity into it?

“But at the end of the day publishers will always want to do that, particularly if you’re spending USD 20 million – you have to try and find that objectivity, and it’s going to come from how much it costs, when it’s coming out, and how good the game is.

“I don’t think you can get away from that, and Metacritic provides a service that gives you a part of that,” he explained.

“If you’re going for a high-end PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 game and you want to break out in the genre, or something like that, you have to target that quality – because otherwise you don’t have a hope in Hell,” he went on.

“There’s too much evidence that shows games which score below a certain level in certain genres are not going to cut through.

“However, there are other genres and other platforms where we wouldn’t put a developer against that score, because it’s more about the brand, the license, the release timing – it’s probably something that in the Metacritic basket of reviews, they’re not going to look at the same things that we’re going to look for when making a game,” Hayes continued.

“So when we’re doing developer contracts, we won’t say to every developer we work with that there’s a target in there. But where we’re spending a lot of money, and the score is essential to the success of the product, absolutely I think there’s a value in it.

“We value the scores that we’re given by the media – it’s a very good way of measuring it – and I don’t think it’s unreasonable for publishers spending that much money to have certain expectations of quality levels. But to demand it on absolutely everything wouldn’t be right at all.”

By Mike Bowden

Sega Europe president and COO, Mike Hayes, told GI that due to the current financial crises, publishers could choose to axe new IP.

“What we’re actually doing is getting rid of the bottom tier of titles that we were putting in to get an extra bit of market share, of money,” he said.

“We’re getting rid of those, and we’re going to focus on the biggest titles – but we do have a lot of new IP coming out. We’ve invested in things like MadWorld, for example, and we feel our line-up is good enough that we can take that.

“But I think a lot of other publishers, and EA have been quite open on this, will stop a lot of projects and cut back,” Hayes explained.

“Ultimately I think the number will go down, which will probably be less good for consumers.”

More through the link.

By Mike Bowden