After introducing a game where players could send people flying to their deaths like human baseballs, Platinum Games seemed to strike out with MadWorld on the Wii. Michael Hayes, President and COO of publisher SEGA says the game struggled to find its audience, and they aren't quite sure why, but he's confident that Platinum's next release, Bayonetta, will experience the same difficulty.

"I think there are clearly development differences between the two," Hayes told G4TV in a phone interview this week. "On MadWorld itself, we're researching it as we speak to try and identify some of the causes behind that. I think Bayonetta comes from a background and a genre that's been already proven to be popular. I think with MadWorld we were trying to be so many different things probably all at once that maybe we pushed the envelope a bit too far."

Bayonetta, a new franchise from Devil May Cry creator Hideki Kamiya, was originally slated for a release before the end of 2009. However, SEGA moved the game into January, as Hayes explains that launching a new franchise is difficult during the November/holiday period. Despite this, he expects the game to do well, regardless of when it is released.

"I think we have a huge, high degree of confidence with Bayonetta because games in that genre on those platforms have been successful in the past," he explained. "We think Bayonetta actually takes that and lifts the quality and lifts the gameplay further to make sure that that's going to be a hit."

And it's right here that I am going to predict that at least one comment points out "MadWorld didn't do well because it was on the Wii, you dumb @#$%," while another says that it wasn't a very good game to start.

Or perhaps it will be the same one. I'll just wait and see.

But MadWorld aside, who's looking forward to Bayonetta? Do you think it will exceed its Platinum Games predecessor?