no, it's the same old industry that it was when they were charging $1.50 per play in Mortal Kombat 2.

the only ones that are pretending otherwise are the marketing people who are expected to be constantly pulling new and different shit at all times so as to justify their existence, this isn't the first time sega has tried to pull out of mainstream gaming and down grade themselves into a casual game company that sells it's shit for full game prices.

.... it never works.

PSO2, Aliens, and probably some other unannounced Platinum games title that was announce will turn massive profits, while their casual games efforts tank, and Sega will back to putting out mainstream games in a couple of years.
THQ?

Yea. There was a thread about that here on GOG.

The fact that they would need to downsize shows that whatever they are doing now isn't working. They need do something fresh and different to give new life to their brand. Clearly making Sonic game after sonic isn't working.

Edit: Sega is already failing and they really don't have much to lose at this point
http://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/sega-announces-cancellations-after-poor-earnings-trademarks-new-valkyria-chronicles-and-yakuza/

What about those rumored Shenmue HD re-releases? :-(

they don't -NEED- to downsize, Sammy -WANTS- them to!

they view the western market as a waste, despite providing adequate returns, and are pulling out of it to save expenses. if you read the article all it talks about is the European and US offices, but not the Japanese ones, that's because this is ONLY effecting the European and US offices.

a -necessary- downsizing would effect all of sega's operations, not just it's foreign ones.


here's the thing: the western offices for Sega make enough money to cover the expense of running themselves, but don't return much to the Japanese accounts. Sammy makes it's money off of Pachinko machines, which only sell in Japan and as an effect they don't give a rat's ass about western cash.

since the western side of the house doesn't provide impressive returns Sammy is cutting them, even though they don't cost anything either.

Which Asperger fellow.....?

That was one of the problems, but also, the unrealistic deadlines / release dates for the games, and huge bonuses that people higher in the company were receiving, yet doing minimal work and making bad decisions.

There was a story about it explaining all.

oh. maybe they'll sell Alpha Protocol IP to Obsidian.

Read somewhere a while back Sega are pretty bad at marketing products out there (Sonic sell's itself as does the FM brand), maybe that doesn't help either?

As far as Japan goes, they won't. But for you lot overseas? I wouldn't get your hopes up.

According to the math I did online....$86,427,279.71

Sega was never known for being geniuses when it came to marketing. This article here goes into detail about Sega's blunders with the Sega Saturn. But in short:
1. "many Saturn games needed to be written in assembly language to achieve decent performance on the hardware" due to there being no useful software development kit
2. The Saturn was rushed to market in a short sighted attempt to one up the PS1
3. The former point also took third party developers by surprise
4. It was sold in selected retailers alienating those that were not chosen to sell it
5. Sega was eager to kill the Saturn and move on to the Dreamcast alienating the developers who were making Saturn games

http://segaretro.org/Sega_Saturn?rdfrom=http%3A%2F%2Finfo.sonicretro.org%2Findex.php%3Ftitle%3DSaturn%26redirect%3Dno

Not to mention that I hear that there was alot of infighting and miscommunication going on at Sega at the time:
http://www.gofanboy.com/features/fanboy-features/2658-top-five-worst-decisions-made-in-the-history-of-video-games
The 32x and the Sega Saturn were developed at the same time.

Here's a link to an interview with Tom Kalinske who the former president of Sega:
http://www.sega-16.com/2006/07/interview-tom-kalinske/

Read that interview at the very least, Sega might as well have not even bothered going into the foreign market if they didn't want it to be a success (ok maybe that was a simplistic way to put it). Also Sega really shot themselves in the foot in retrospect when the Japanese division turned down a partnership with Sony. I found this interesting, since I knew Nintendo turned down the deal as well.

edit to include an intersting quote from the interview about the potential Sega/Sony deal
"Sony apparently gave the green light to that. I took it to Sega of Japan and told them that this was what we thought an ideal platform would be, at least from an U.S. perspective, based on what we’ve learned from the Sega CD, and our involvement with Sony and our own people. Sega said not a chance. Why would it want to share a platform with Sony? Sega would be much better off just developing its own platform, and it’s nice that we had some ideas on what that platform ought to be and they’d consider it, but the company would be developing its next platform itself." ~ Kalinske

Oh that's true. I just don't think a big budget Vectorman is the answer either.

They should have focused on the Wii early and made more classic style games for that starving market. Maybe Vectorman and the rest could have played a part there. It's too late for that though, so what do they do now? I would guess they will start focusing on downloadables and smaller titles, which could be a good way to bring your faves back if they see it as profitable. They haven't so far though.

In short they didn't respond to a changing market well at all and are getting left behind. That's business.

That was a joke, this one.