Yo, what if Nintendo bought SEGA?

[jonboy101]

A lot of people give SEGA shit for releasing less games now than they did in the console era, but the thing is (like you're saying ROJM) they no longer need to fill in the missing pieces of a console library. I didn't quite get that until I saw your posts, but it makes total sense now. Why would they need the 2K sports games? They have no need to compete in that market.

Well, I think 2k might be an exception. Those games made a lot of money, I'm sure, and got a lot of good press. Those games didn't need very big budgets, and the football and basketball iterations sell around a million annually, per system.


I actually forget why, but Sega sold Visual Concepts (and with it, 2k) back in 2004 or 2005. I believe EA games bought some licenses or something, and it seems Sega believed they couldn't compete without them, so they just sold the studio. One of the dumbest decisions in the history of a company heralded for its unique capacity to make remarkably stupid decisions.

Sega should have never left the American sports market, console or no console.

[Ben]

A lot of people give SEGA shit for releasing less games now than they did in the console era, but the thing is (like you're saying ROJM) they no longer need to fill in the missing pieces of a console library. I didn't quite get that until I saw your posts, but it makes total sense now. Why would they need the 2K sports games? They have no need to compete in that market.

Well financially, it pays off to have a successful series seeing a new release every year. If you do sports games well, like the developers of NBA 2k currently are, it definitely pays off for the company.

That said, it took many years for Visual Concepts to start doing well for Take-Two.

[ungibbed]

While sports games were not really my preference over the years, without any support from EA on the Dreamcast, it was awesome to not only have a fresh team to produce the various 2K titles on the system which in some cases were better than EA's efforts and going head to head against Sony and 989 studios on the PlayStation, I could see Sega had a gem that saved the bacon (and a void in the Dreamcast library.

Sometimes though, you can only get so much before innovation begins to slow and sales slump. If that's the case, it may have been a wise move. Sega as of late though has not shown much wisdom.

It would be great to see a leadership shuffle that understands Sega and the position they're in. No console launch obviously, but when specific teams were producing games on the Gamecube, Xbox, and PS2, they felt far more focused then the company is currently. Mobile gaming is a easy market that they have been doing well with (iOS, Android, and even BlackBerry) otherwise, it feels like things are spread a bit thin to me.

Personally, I feel a long overdue revival of the Panzer Dragoon universe is key and getting some quality games to the Wii U. As for mobile gaming, I'd love some Space Harrier on my Galaxy S3.

[ROJM]

Well, I think 2k might be an exception. Those games made a lot of money, I'm sure, and got a lot of good press. Those games didn't need very big budgets, and the football and basketball iterations sell around a million annually, per system.


I actually forget why, but Sega sold Visual Concepts (and with it, 2k) back in 2004 or 2005. I believe EA games bought some licenses or something, and it seems Sega believed they couldn't compete without them, so they just sold the studio. One of the dumbest decisions in the history of a company heralded for its unique capacity to make remarkably stupid decisions.

Sega should have never left the American sports market, console or no console.

Exactly. That was all Satomi's doing as well. And what happened? 2K sportsline made major inroads in the american game charts top 10 and 20 while Sega games didn't make a dent in the US charts top ten/twenty for nearly 4 years.

[ROJM]

binary domain came later but in my opinion vanquish is better and bigger. while binary is hmm. more of the same. but in overall i agree with you.
just had to bring this up

I was talking about what if a game basically copied BINARY DOMAIN's engine and came out next year or within the next two years and not only became popular with gamer but made more money and how would Sega and every sega fan who supported this game feel? I wasn't talking about when BD actually came out.

[ROJM]

A lot of people give SEGA shit for releasing less games now than they did in the console era, but the thing is (like you're saying ROJM) they no longer need to fill in the missing pieces of a console library. I didn't quite get that until I saw your posts, but it makes total sense now. Why would they need the 2K sports games? They have no need to compete in that market.

They dont need to do that and they did at one point stop doing that between (2003 -2008) which oddly enough wasn't a great period in Sega gaming. I think only Sega Of America was picking up the odd titles for localisation due to Sega Japan's distrubuting them like OTOGI and GUNGRAVE which is why Sega of america/europe ended up publishing them. SOJ only went back to proper second party publishing from 2008 onwards when they were inking deals with Image Epoch, Platinum and Triace.

The thing is sort of a Sega tradition now because they've been doing it for so long and didn't really stop doing it. From the likes of Treasure and Nex/Gau entertainment and the Saturn with Warp graphics, we got a lot of not only good and strong second party games but games while not being Sega lived to the spirit of what sega was about, exciting, original or innovative in either execution, style or gameplay.

I think if you look at the titles released between 2008-2011, you see a rich diversity between the SOJ inhouse games,the Sega second party support and the Sega west titles. Whether or not these games turned into successes or were even good or not, its a quite unique lineup that they had during that period which a lot of their competitors lacked.  Oddly enough it was quite amusing how many of Sega's titles had similar concepts/subjects that ended up coming out or being announced around the same time. VANQUISH and BINARY DOMAIN is the most recent one but previously you had YAKUZA 3 and ALPHA PROTOCOL dealing with the CIA element and Sega west's divisions releasing two sword and socercy games in the same year with SOA's GOLDEN AXE BEAST RIDER and Sega Europe's VIKING BATTLE FOR ASGARD. Regardless it felt that Sega was back to its old self, even SONIC strated to improve around this period. And the digital line up did reflect that. But now while i understand the wrong one like the sale of Visual concepts proved. A knee jerk reaction. Sega is strongest when all these things are at play and not just one thing.

[jonboy101]

I tend to agree. I think one of the things I enjoy most about Sega is how truly diverse the company is, because of a rather long history of no third party support. Sega has a very deep stable in damn near every genre to put into the fray, but they never really seem to do much with them.

For fighting games, Sega has how many franchises? Virtua Fighter, Fighting Vipers, Last Bronx, Eternal Champions, and on and on. They have lots of racers; Daytona, Sega Rally, Sega GT, Ferrari F351, OutRun, Sega All-Stars Racing, Virtua Racing. They have RPGs, they have rail shooters (HoTD, Let's Go Jungle, Ghost Squad, Virtua Cop, Panzer Dragoon, Rez) platformers, pet simulation (Seaman), dance (Samba, Space Channel 5), first and third person shooters, sand box games, brawlers (Streets of Rage, Die Hard Arcade), games that defie genre. We have ninjas, shape shifters, date simulator/mech battles, SRPGs, straight up mech battles, bug battles, space operas and Space Michaels, air plains, falling blocks, tennis, survival horror, survival horror in a submarine and so on and so on and so on.

I like it when Sega is running on all cylinders, and I frankly wish they were better at keeping some of their games going, a bit better. That is one thing I wish Sega could learn from Nintendo; keeping your franchises relevant. It feels like Sega is so sporadic. From 1998 to 2002, we had three House of the Dead games, a House of the Dead brawler, a House of the Dead pinball game, and a House of the Dead typing game. Then it just dries up for years, until we suddenly get House of the Dead 4, Typing of the Dead 2, House of the Dead Overkill, House of the Dead EX, House of the Dead 2&3 Return, and whatever else. It's always in bursts with Sega. We had about 9 Shinobi games between 87 and 95. Then we got one in 2002, one in 2004 and then one in 2011. Sega's been trying to reboot Streets of Rage since 1996. I have no doubt Shenmue 3 will come - just, when it does, I'll probably be retired.

[Centrale]

I don't think I'd want Sega to imitate Nintendo's strategy.  Nintendo pretty much is just always going to do sequels to their handful of franchises from here until eternity.  Seems like Pikmin is the last major new thing they came up with.

[Ben]

Well their support for the Wii included many new IP, though unfortunately they almost all targeted casuals.

Xenoblade and The Last Story are two of their recent new IP that targeted the hardcore.

[Centrale]

I see... but didn't it take a tremendous fan effort to get them to bring those games to the West, a year or two after release?  Well, at least they finally did it.

[jonboy101]

I don't think I'd want Sega to imitate Nintendo's strategy.  Nintendo pretty much is just always going to do sequels to their handful of franchises from here until eternity.  Seems like Pikmin is the last major new thing they came up with.

Not necessarily imitate. All I'm suggesting is that Sega keep up some of their big titles a bit better. They can build on what they have, and change things up plenty, but that shouldn't mean the only titles I can rest assured of seeing are Virtua Fighter, Yakuza, Sonic, Football Manager and Total War.

[ROJM]

Nintendo was forced to create more game content themselves with the N64 when they ironically suffered the same fate Sega did during the 80s and mid nineties, no real third party support. The did the same with the cube and then the Wii but no one not even nintendo knew that the Wii would become a big hit and then of course the other similarity with Sega happened, when their first party games was directly competing and seling better than their first party support.

Judging from the Wii U line up it seems Nintendo is falling back on the N64 stratedgy on relying on second party companies to create content for them, which seems to include Sega/Platinum with BAYONETTA 2. Makes you also wonder if the other title that Platinum is making for Nintendo was a game they were planning to make for Sega but just didn't happen...

[ROJM]

Not necessarily imitate. All I'm suggesting is that Sega keep up some of their big titles a bit better. They can build on what they have, and change things up plenty, but that shouldn't mean the only titles I can rest assured of seeing are Virtua Fighter, Yakuza, Sonic, Football Manager and Total War.

Well that's sadly is another tradition in Sega that many of us had to get use to. The franchises you mentioned in a previous post, any company would make money from and retire with just a handful or one of the games you mentioned. But Sega as you mentioned has all these games under one roof and they can't do them all especially when as a company they always want to do new titles and new games which leave the older franchises in limbo sometimes. Its a vicious circle because some new titles they create end up becoming classics and then they get rested in favour for a brand new game and it goes on and on. Also bad luck seems to be a problem. Sega was planning to do an ALTERED BEAST sequel back in the genesis era which failed to take off, SOR always seems to get greenlit then cancelled even when the original team with Yuzo wanted to do a sequel back in the early noughties.
But some franchises that has indeed made money Sega rested for no real reason at all. SAKURA TAISEN got "retired" after suffering a dive in sales(But not enough of a dive to stop the series)and Sega not only stopped the game, they closed most of the merchandise including the shop along with it. Now all of a sudden they've started to slowly reintroduce the franchise with cameos, anime a new live action theatre show and a couple of new games.
Prehaps another argument is that these titles mentioned just doesn't sell to today's consumer which is why when they have been released be it ORTA,SHINOBI 2002 or SAMBA they've not been finacial successes. Compared to games that they've made adapting to the current gamers tastes rather than the Sega gamers tastes like YAKUZA or SONIC or SHINING crap. If Sega had the money to create a new game system the fortunes for these titles would be slightly different. But of course Sega as a third party needs to market the games properly too.