Codemasters Rails Against Lazy Wii Games

GRiD developers Codemasters have no patience for lazy Wii games, the majority of which they’ve referred to as “white noise.”

You can’t blame developers for trying to make an easy buck with an easily profitable low-budget Wii game when the possibility of completely falling flat on your face and into bankruptcy for pouring all your capital into a single project is such a gamble during trying economic times, but Codemasters have had their fill with the practice. “You can’t ignore Wii, but it’s bewildering watching what other publishers are doing,” the company marketing vice-president Alex Bertie told MCV. “Codemasters has taken a more cautious strategy on Wii which has been the right thing to do.”

Instead of shoveling out low-quality games, Codemasters believes that their games ascribe to a higher standard. “We are not going to make cheap, crappy ports,” Bertie said. “DiRT on Wii, for instance, is not Mario Kart…we’re not planning to compete in this ‘big head sports arena’ that everyone is obsessed with – the shelves are cluttered with those games.”

I’m not sure what they mean by “big head sports arena” unless they’re referring to cutesy sports games with Mii-esque characters bobbing around and throwing Frisbees at cute dogs.

For Codemasters, the “bewildering” part of this business model isn’t just that the games are bad, but that they ultimately aren’t sustainable because the market becomes saturated with inferior products. “There’s only a number of times I think you can go to a retailer with a DS or Wii game which is that type of mass-market product,” Jeremy Wigmore, general manager of Codemasters UK, said. “Those games just become white noise.”