Today, Sega of America confirmed that it had to lay off a small percentage of its staff. While there is not much in the way of details, a Sega Spokeswoman had this to say.
Ad:“As the gaming industry continues to evolve, companies must adapt and adjust in order to compete and succeed in an ever-changing environment. As a result of this, Sega of America has recently undergone a restructure that will enable the company to focus efficiently on developing new and existing content across digital platforms as well as continuing to focus on key brands for packaged goods.”
This is all your fault shigs!
How much smaller can the company get?
PS – This is always very annoying:
Error: Sonic is NOT “Blue”. Make sure your chosen color is typed in all lowercase and in english.
Translation : “Basically, we are an ever dwindling company even though we are also considered one of the biggest names in the industry, we keep fucking up with bad decisions, shit advertising (if we even bother to advertise our content at all), we keep disapointing more of our followers by banning and blocking their video content showcasing our products in action on social/video media sites like Youtube and even though we’ve went through three decades of this, we still can’t seem to make good decisions on these things based on all that experience, our biggest ever success ever was our mascot, Sonic the Hedgehog, which practically almost made one of our consoles a total success and would have propelled us a huge company on the scale of Sony and Microsoft today, if only we bothered to play our cards right, though these days, we simply restrict our mascot, our most prized asset to the current vastly underperforming console of our old nemesis, Nintendo, further disapointing our fans and restricting the level of success of this IP, like we tend to do on a lot of other IP’s – which we like to ban and not bother localising.”
Simples.
Just a case of taking away the fancy public relations professional patter speech and behold, the true translation emerges behind the facade of corporate verbosity.
For Gawd sake, Sega, you’d think they’d have got the hint by now..
Is there really any point to Sega’s American branch now? They may want to hold onto their CV’s, it may come in handy..
I didn’t think Sega of America could get any smaller, seems Sega’s real home territories are Europe and Japan in particular where they feel more at home.
SEGA of America are incompetent these days. I do feel sorry for those who lost their jobs, but it should be obvious that they ONLY market Sonic and give the scraps to Yakuza, Phantasy Star and Valkyria Chornicles (at least before 3).
I guess I pity the team, as I feel like they don’t try hard enough, so I can’t sympathise with the layoffs.
I wish those dropped well, but I don’t think they’ll get as a comfortable job then at SEGA America.
Sega’s American arm/base is pretty much irrelevant these days, and has never been truly relevant since the Dreamcast, but Sega of America is merely one small part of Sega as a whole, on the whole, Sega is doing quite well, with a few obvious minor let downs, Sega America being the biggest one of the few in that collection, but over all, Sega’s doing fine and fairing better in the east like here in Europe and Japan.
It’s a shame, because America is a huge market too with decent potential, and with this announcement, their presence there is going to get steadily more smaller yet. They seem to be more interested in downsizing than doing anything else to rectify the situation, which suggests Sega don’t have much faith in that market, not a good sign for the immediate future.
SegaBits should save up some money to buy SEGA IPs.
You guys would probably do a better job than SoA anyway, right?
Oh, if only we were capable of doing so. I’d try to push a new Streets of Rage, Shinobi and Virtua Cop.
It’s tricky, SEGA doesnt want to take any risks. It needs a better business model. They could look at licensing some of their IP’s out to developers. Also look at their pricing models. They haven’t got it all wrong. Sonic Dash has been a great game, well supported by devs. Ok the microtransactions werent perfect but it was a step in the right direction. But games lik Sonic Transformed have been missed opportunities. SEGA could have had new racers, tracks etc. Instead a superb game died a quick death.
It’s sad that Sonic Dash is considered a step in the right direction, considering it’s a clone of Temple Run.
“As the gaming industry continues to evolve, companies must adapt and adjust in order to compete and succeed in an ever-changing environment. As a result of this, Sega of America has recently undergone a restructure that will enable the company to focus efficiently on developing new and existing content across digital platforms as well as continuing to focus on key brands for packaged goods.”
An efficiency and focus problem, huh? =P
It’s hard to find anything to be optimistic about here. Best of luck to those laid off
North America is statistically the largest market in the gaming industry. That Sega is continuing to minimize their American presence and seemingly giving up on the biggest gaming region makes me worry that Sammy has no interest in growing Sega’s gaming market.
How sad would it be if only a few years from now, Sega exists entirely in the form of Pachinko machines? I hope I’m wrong.
Aladdin’s Chance (playable in the Volcano Arcade club in Yakuza 4 and Yakuza: Dead Souls, passed Tenkaichi st) wasn’t too bad, quite good I’d say, I’d even say it has that sort of Sega-esque feel to it.
Sega made the actual game in it’s visuals, Sammy merely providing the mechanical pachinko equipment placed in Sega’s centers.
Sammy makes Pachinko machines
Sega makes Arcade games (like they always do)
It’s interesting when you think of their regional differences in levels of success.
For example;
1. Sega’s first big international success was the Sega Master System in Europe, which has left a lasting impression to this day there, it’s part of the reason Nintendo has never had as big a European presence there by comparison most of that time even up to now,
2. Sega’s MegaDrive (Known as the ‘MegaDrive’ in Japan/European nations) was also a massive success in Europe, and did quite well in America under it’s ‘Genesis’ guise there, giving Sega a big market share against Nintendo for the first time in recent memory, though not quite an equal match in Japan.
3. Where as the next Sega console, the Saturn, was quite successful in Japan initially for a few years, even outselling the Playstation, up till around ’97, which was when the PSX got Squaresoft’s blessing in the form of Final Fantasy VII, but it did poorly in Europe in comparison to their first two consoles, and did absolutely shit in America.
4. And then finally, the Dreamcast, for the first time in a while, America seemed to get top headlines initially in terms of geographical comparisons to the other two major markets of the world, though it did good in Europe far better than the Saturn did but it’s short life span caught up with it just as it was beginning to sell like hot cakes again (as Sega was losing money on every console sold due to manufacturing costs – due to Sega outsourcing and being forced into a competitive production model that they could not get the good value that Sony was getting for their new PS2), in Japan it wasn’t too bad, but could’ve done better.
All in all, Sega consoles seem to have quite a checkered level of success in different regions in comparison, rather than a universally global success all at the same time.
It seems this trend continues with Sega of America, after the major success of the Dreamcast launch, it’s true they’ve kind of left America in neglect since then, I haven’t seen them provide much there since ’05, when they were bolstering up their western development studios, only for many of them to go into relative obscurity a few years later.
The less said about Australia though, the better, they get it worse even more than America does, Sega didn’t even bother with a long term arm there, instead they simply hired THQ to oversee distribution there, it would be an obvious loss if they tried this tactic in America in future too.
Also, not many people actually even know this, even those clued up on Sega knowledge, but the Playstation at one point very nearly became a Sega console (mind Sony didn’t even originally want to make consoles, they were just looking for a video game company partner who could take the brand and technology they were using), the head of Sega’s American branch at that time, Tom Kalinske, gave an interview about the relationship between Sega and Sony then, taking about how Sony came to Sega after Nintendo screwed them over and rebuffed their initial deal.
I wonder if the Sega heads had taken this route that early on, the Playstation brand today might, no likely even, could have been Sega’s, Sony would still be one of Sega’s major suppliers today, it was a decision largely originated from Sega’s America side of the pond;
Just take a gander at this article here… http://www.ps3hax.net/2013/07/the-playstationps1-could-have-been-a-sega-console/