So you guys already know the speculation, SEGA hasn’t signed up for a exhibition booth for this year’s E3. Of course, we thought that it would have meant that they were just going to sign up late, sadly that is not the case as SEGA has now confirmed to Game Informer via email:
“Over the next months, SEGA of America will be focusing on the restructure and relocation to Southern California, and we have decided to not attend E3 with our own booth this year. With the majority of our bigger titles launching later in 2015/2016, particularly those from our AAA studios Relic Entertainment, Sports Interactive and Creative Assembly, we are concentrating our efforts for some of these major announcements after our relocation. Instead, we will be collaborating with our various business partners for this year’s E3 show.”
It seems that them restructuring and moving to Southern California is to blame for their lack of E3 showing this year. Not only that, they will also be showing titles at other ‘business partner’ booths. I assume you can find stuff like Dengeki Bunko: Fighting Climax and Yakuza 5 at Sony’s booth for example. What are your thoughts on SEGA skipping E3 for this year?
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Oh how the mighty have fallen.
That’s fine. I think the relevancy of E3 has diminished over the years, anyway, so the whole thing could disappear for all I care ;3
Only E3, right? As long as SEGA doesn’t skip TGS, I think it’s still fine.
It was expected.
When companies I’m interested in don’t show up at E3 I become less motivated to involve myself in the conference, but I myself don’t have strong expectations going into E3 anyway. E3 is important for I think bigger titles or companies promoting their strategies (relationship with indies, etc.) but I often don’t invest myself in the big titles. so eh.
It probably is also too embarrassing to deal with all the PSO2 demands…
SEGA won’t have its own booth at E3 2015. Its priority is handling the internal restructuring, lay-offs, and moving its California offices.
Poor SEGA… it’s not easy keeping afloat without any relevant IP.
Except Shenmue, Yakuza, Sonic, Daytona, Bayonetta, Out Run, Nights, Skies of Arcadia, Phantasy Star, Panzer Dragoon, Virtua Fighter, Virtua Tennis, Virtua Racing, Virtua Cop, Virtua Striker, Virtua On, Valkyria Chronicles, After Burner, Altered Beast, Alex Kidd, Total War, Streets of Rage, Space Harrier, Shinobi, Jet Set Radio, Hatsune Miku, Ecco the Dolphin…
Seriously SEGA I’m starting to see how a few hope you die and/or sell your IPs to anyone who isn’t EA/WB/Ubisoft. At least we would get the other 90% of the IPs you’re deliberately letting rot.
With all due respect, a good chunk of the names you listed haven’t been relevant in a while. As far as I’m aware, Ecco’s last appearance was a 3DS rerelease, Alex Kidd, Skies of Arcadia and JSR characters are pretty much limited to SEGA All Stars games and a lot of the rest of the IPs you mentioned are relegated to existence solely in the Project X Zone series now. However, that is not to say that IPs like Sonic (duh), Bayonetta and Hatsune Miku are no longer relevant; far from it. What I’m saying is that a lot of SEGA’s more (relatively) well known IPs just haven’t seen a solid original title in a good while.
This is my point, they haven’t been relevant for a while because Sega has left them to rot away into obscurity for years, and it’s led to this catch 22 situation where they either release them and don’t market them or don’t release them at all and end up with a sparse line up. Nintendo has IP set like Sega and doesn’t have a problem with keeping them relevant, Sega and Nintendo were the only ones at one point who were looking after their IPs well, that was until Sega abandoned their hardware series of home consoles and went progressively downhill from there.
I don’t see why sites are making such a big deal about this. Didn’t they say a while ago that they weren’t doing a booth this year? It’s not like they won’t be at Sony’s booth showing of Yakuza.
This is what happen when you blindly follow the easy short term cash of mobile market while trashing 40 years of legacy.
Well done, for 2016 there will be the total retirement from western console market.
Admitedly, it’s appearing this way more and more as times goes on, in ’01 Sega was touted as an unstoppable force in the industry after changing their policy to a platform agnostic one, 14 years on, fat chance did they gain even close to that 25% of the video game industry. And now I can already see the history being repeated here, Sega will abandon their packaged goods as a primary focus only to be more profitable than ever before, instead, they’re progressively morphing into a mobile centric company, and when that happens, it’ll probably be a whole slew of new problems with Sega software being too short, too casual and too mediocre.
Well, how the mighty have fallen indeed, Sega used to be considered an empire in the video game industry, in ’92, when they commanded and owned 60+% of the industry, since then, they’ve never reached close to that, there’s been the odd good year here and there, the last great one we had was in ’12 and ’10 before that, since then, they’ve seemingly become more irrelevant on the world stage.
That doesn’t mean Sega is in decay
It means the E3 is
Why not both?
So why is Capcom, Namco and even Konami there? You know Sega’s slipping when they can’t even to muster a presence that compares to them.
People only watch E3 for the big keynote speaches anyway. Honestly, Nintendo wasn’t dumb in abandoning the E3 stage to make their own Keynotes in a sound stage for a lot cheaper and just releasing it online for mass consumption and hype generation.
How much attention do you honestly think a subtitled, PS3, non-Sony game that came out 3 years ago will be given at a Sony booth dedicated primarily to PS4 titles?
Eh. I made my thoughts known last time but skipping E3 is a pretty bad decision. We know Sega of America is moving, they really couldn’t scrape together a few people from Sega Europe to man a booth for 3 days?
Regardless, whether or not Sega is being honest that there is nobody at the company in the US capable of running an E3 booth at this point in time, I think honestly the perception that this will create about Sega among gamers may not be worth whatever inconvenience it’d have caused to send a few people from SF (or hell, the UK, if they have to) down to LA for a few days.
So yeah I still disagree with the decision.
They have literally no games to show. What are they going to do with a booth?
“Please enjoy this trailer for Warhammer. Again. Also here’s some mobile phone freemium apps. You guys like apps right?”
I Want Jet Set Radio Future HD on Steam.
And i will not Stop untill i get the Concept of Love.
E3 or not E3 stop making your company worst as been KONAMI too!
Listen to THE FANS!
SEGA DID say they will be at E3. They just won’t have their own booth.
You are 100% correct, i’ll fix the title.
What’s the point of going to E3 if you don’t even have a booth? Kind of defeats the point, companies need them to showcase their upcoming line ups and Sega have next to none aside from Yakuza 5 – a 3 year old game that was made for a last generation console.
Well, they also have a game from GameFreak.
Seeing as Sega will be in attendance then, what have they got lined up?
* Yakuza 5
* Game Freak collaboration title
* Hatsuni Miku sequel
Anything else?
Dengeki Bunko Fighting Climax (Ps3/Vita) and as far as I know, the only scheduled and announced Miku game is released this month on 3DS, unless it is actually delayed (according to the euro distributor it is).
And Yakuza Zero maybe? if Sony is doing the effort to bring Yakuza 5 it’s possible they want Zero too, and announcing Zero some weeks before the release of Yakuza 5 will both help Y5 sales and PS4 lineup.
Yes, Nintendo Direct does very well for Nintendo. As someone mentioned, SEGA should do this. They also have Atlus now, so they could build a somewhat small but loyal community.
Oh, and what is Sonic Team doing? Sonic Boom wasn’t theirs. After Colors and Generations, I want some PS4 Sonic!
These expos are expensive to put on anyway.
That’d be a good idea, if they were still producing their own home hardware, but they’d don’t have a hardware base anymore to make having a Sega Direct a worthwhile cause.
God knows what Sonic Team is doing, probably the same as most of Sega’s other studios, nothing.
Even Capcom and Namco still use their in-house devs, Sega instead just buys or hires third party companies to do their developments for them, like Relic, Creative Assembly and Atlus.
Well, I’ve said it before, and I think it needs to be said again, that Sega is a terribly managed company, goes without saying really.
Let’s just say for instance that it really is the fact that they are moving offices to California that was the cause their absence – even though it can’t possibly that hard even for a company like Sega to hire space at a trade show for a few days while moving, they should have had the foresight to anticipate this, they’ve had nearly a year to prepare for it as well.