SEGA Sammy has released their earnings report for 2013, yielding a net profit of ¥44.3 billion, or $434 million, and a 564% increase year over year. The company attributed it to strong Pachinko performance and the sales of investment securities and non-current assets.
On the home electronics side, SEGA’s top three performing titles were Football Manager 14 at 680,000 units, Sonic Lost World for a combined 640,000 units, and the Japan-Only SAKATSUKU Pro Succer Club wo Tsukurou! for 200,000. Despite this, the nine-month period ending on Dec. 31, 2013 in which SEGA tracked numbers returned only 6.5 million total units of games moved, a decrease it attributes to “the harsh market environment.”
It’s not all doom and gloom because the company also found what they call “continued favorable” success on the digital side with Phantasy Star Online 2 and mobile phone titles Puyopuyo!! Quest and CHAIN CHRONICLE as the top runners there. The whole division saw a 19.7% increase year-to-year in net sales to a total of ¥72,934 million.
Keep in mind, back in November, SEGA purchased Atlus-parent company Index for a seemingly paltry ¥14 billion.
The release of the financial data comes hours after SEGA unveiled its plans for a massive spin-off of Sonic The Hedgehog with Sonic Boom.
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those SLW sales are surprisingly good considering that leaked report claiming it had moved only about 200k combined.
As good as this news is, this isn’t necessarily good for a home console manufacturer as well, it wouldn’t be bad, just not significant enough to support a console.
Plus what would Sega gain from flooding the market with new hardware? Nothing, other than appeasing die hard fans. But Sega is a company first, and therefore a business, it needs to think seriously and plan for the future, and there is no point in coming back as a major player in the industry now, if they ever will one day.
I’ll be fine if Sega release more games to Linux. I think that will happen as soon as people start to use SteamOS. I would like to see Sonic and Sega all-star racing running under SteamOS.