As we reported on Friday, Sega of America vice president of marketing Scott Steinberg dropped what could be equated to a nuclear bomb on Nintendo. Sega, once fierce rivals, is now a third party supporter of Nintendo. You could not tell from the comments coming out of Steinberg’s mouth, saying, “I’m not sure if they will top out in 2008 or 2007” and “The Wii will start to look really dated in a couple years.”
As we pointed out, Sega has supported the Wii with one of the most well received 3D Sonic games ever, has had success on the Nintendo DS and is developing several games for the Wii, including Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games and a sequel to NiGHTS into Dreams. It was surprising for us to see Sega put their success with Nintendo systems on the line with such harsh and out of the mainstream comments. They must have realized their public relations problem as Steinberg was quick to more or less retract the statements that he made.
“SEGA has fully supported the Wii since day one and we continue to do so – it’s no secret that we are close partners. Nintendo has done a masterful job of selling its vision and expanding the market. That said, it’s a shared responsibility and opportunity for the whole industry to take advantage of the possibilities of the Wii. If we don’t realize its true potential, we will have missed a great opportunity to expand creatively and that is what I was cautioning against in the Reuters interview. I’m not just putting the responsibility of innovation on Nintendo. It’s on SEGA and all the publishers and developers as well to carry that flag,” Steinberg said in a clarification to Reuters.
