SEGA Sammy Q3 Results for 2013

[Aki-at]

SEGA Sammy released their Q3 earnings yesterday for the current fiscal year 2013. Here are some of the tadbits to take note of

- Overall group net profits stand currently at ¥3 billion (£20,433,810/$32,003,400)

- Focusing on SEGA itself, Arcade sales operating profits were ¥2,6 billion (£17,742,998/$27,993,160 ) Consumer Division ¥519 million (£3,541,775.37/$5,587,865.40) and Arcade Centres ¥984 million (£6,715,042.32/$10,594,334.40)

- Sammy recorded ¥7.7 billion operating profits (£52,512,691/$82,168,240) a significant decrease from last year's ¥71 billion (£483,600,170/$757,413,800)

- Due to no major new titles being sold by both the arcade division and the delay of various pachislot machines (One based on Fist of the Northstar was expected to sell over 200,000 units) forecast adjusted to ¥12 billion for net income from the original ¥40 billion

- Arcade sales are as followed
WORLD CLUB Champion Football Series - ¥2.8 billion
SENGOKU-TAISEN Trading Card Game - ¥1.9 billion
StarHorse3 Season I A NEW LEGEND BEGINS - ¥1.6 billion

- Game sales are as followed
Sonic & All Stars Racing Transformed - 930,000 units
Football Manager 2013 - 730,000 units (Fastest selling title in series history)
Yakuza 5 - 580,000 units
Football Manager 2013 iOS - Over 500,000 units sold
Dragon Coins iOS - Over 500,000 downloads

- Phantasy Star Online 2 continues to beat SEGA's expectations, is now currently at over 1.7 million registered users.

- Finally, packaged games continue to be SEGA's strongest business in consumer division, generated ¥26.3 billion (£179,477,249/$283,161,580) vs digital games ¥20.5 billion (£139,896,715/$220,715,300) this despite SEGA hoping that both packaged and digital games sales being equal. What has caused the difference no doubt is the continued sales of SEGA's back catalogue beating expectations.

- Packaged goods is close to meeting the full year goal of ¥32.2 billion year target when you consider that sales of Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed and Football Manager 2013 should continue into next quarter whilst release of Aliens: Colonial Marines, Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA F, Phantasy Star Online 2 Vita and Shining Ark.

- Digital games still someway off of meeting the ¥32.2 billion year target. But continued sales of Kingdom Conquest 2 (Was only released in December) The Cave and SEGA's major iOS title Demon Tribe ought to help push it, but most likely will miss target I believe.

- 1,570,000 units sold in Japan, 2,430,000 units sold in the US and 2,940,000 units sold in Europe

- Full year target still on course but may miss due to Europe (My personal opinion)

- Full year targets 2,060,000 in Japan, 2,850,000 in US and 4,020,000 in Europe

Now please PLEASE keep in mind these are very rough estimations, so they could be all terribly wrong (Just what I've worked out looking at the shipment information)

- Using very VERY rough estimation based on reported targets for Q4, I gather their sales targets for the following titles are...
Aliens: CM Xbox360 ver - Around 930,000 units
Aliens: CM PS3 ver - Around 600,000 units
PC sales of Aliens: CM, Sonic & Allstars Racing and Rome II - Less than 790.000
Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA F - Less than 390,000
Shining Ark - Less than 230,000
Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed 3DS ver (They list one more SKU but SEGA has nothing else in this period for 3DS) - Less than 370,000
Phantasy Star Online 2 Vita - Less than 210,000

And that is all folks! Discuss away!

[Barry the Nomad]

Thanks again for putting all this together. As somebody who isn't so good at getting my heard around this stuff, your breakdowns are a big help. As such I thanked you a lot in my write up. :3

So, would you say overall this is good news for SEGA? The way I read it, it could have been better, but it's not bad at all. Seems the fist of the north star delay hurt Q3, but will be a success once it releases, balancing things out.

[ROJM]

Aki you do know they wont seperate the sales of a multiplatform title by different systems in the public report dont you? They'll just lump them all together as they usually do.

Ok. So that means SONIC AND ALL STAR RACING TRANSFORMED was a hit/success then. And Package sales are being boosted by the PC factor once again. Odd that TOTAL WAR didn't get mentioned. All this really shows that Sega shouldn't necessarly stop the package side of things and just focus on digital but give them both strong support. 

[Aki-at]

Thanks again for putting all this together. As somebody who isn't so good at getting my heard around this stuff, your breakdowns are a big help. As such I thanked you a lot in my write up. :3

So, would you say overall this is good news for SEGA? The way I read it, it could have been better, but it's not bad at all. Seems the fist of the north star delay hurt Q3, but will be a success once it releases, balancing things out.

No problem Barry, always happy to help!

From the looks of things, Sammy has really been hurt by the delay of their major titles (They have only sold 80,000 and 20,000 units of their Pachinko and Pachislot machines respectively) but that means Q1 for 2014 should be extremely strong for that side of the business.

SEGA on the other hand has done pretty well. Video game sales are strong (And all they need to do is make $60 million for the next quarter on packaged goods to beat their packaged goods expectations) and thankfully it seems none of their games have failed. But worry still is Aliens CM, this game can really go either way in terms of sales and it is clear SEGA is banking a lot on it. Arcade and amusement centres seem to be steady but SEGA still has worry on how well their amusement centres are going to do.

So good but nothing spectacular, but after last years loss in the consumer division of 15 billion yen ($160,273,500) it will be a stark improvement over last year.

Aki you do know they wont seperate the sales of a multiplatform title by different systems in the public report dont you? They'll just lump them all together as they usually do.

Yeap aware of that.

[Barry the Nomad]

Just a little ranting and spitting out some stuff that is in my head:

Over at Sonic Stadium I got into a bit of an argument over how I actually agreed with SEGA West trimming down their boxed content. First off, I'm of the mindset that when SEGA said they were to focus on franchises like Sonic, Total War, Football Manager and Aliens, this wasn't a literal "these four and these four only statement" but rather these were the four major boxed titles SEGA West was releasing in 2012/2013 with Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed (UK developed, US/Europe released), Total War: Shogun 2 & Total War: Rome II (UK developed, US/Europe released), Football Manager 2013 (UK developed, US/Europe released) and Aliens: Colonial Marines (UK developed, US/Europe released).

Hey, look at that! The entirety of SEGA Wests developed and boxed content! No shit like Marvel titles, Nancy Drew, Polar Express, bad remakes, Alpha Protocol, London 2012 Olympics, Conduit, Tournament of Legends. To be honest, I'd prefer a smaller quality lineup to a larger lineup with a ton of misses, a few decent titles and a couple hits.

Like I said, I read SEGA's statement as being a Western statement, not having to do with SEGA of Japan's output. So SEGA of Japan still would be releasing stuff like Yakuza, whatever Platinum Games titles they are still partnered to do (I think the partnership is over, but who knows), smaller 3DS stuff like Rhythm Thief, the many Shining rpgs, arcade titles that are console friendly (Virtua Fighter). I guess SEGA West comes into play when it comes to deciding on what SEGA of Japan games to localize. Personally I can do without the Shining titles, and really just want the Yakuza team stuff, whatever AM2 is cooking up, the Sonic Team titles (which are always assured to be worldwide) and the occasional kooky new IPs like Rhythm Thief.

--

Anybody think SEGA West trimming the fat* contributed to boxed titles being strong?

*shitty games that got poor scores and low sales

[Aki-at]

Just a little ranting and spitting out some stuff that is in my head:

Over at Sonic Stadium I got into a bit of an argument over how I actually agreed with SEGA West trimming down their boxed content. First off, I'm of the mindset that when SEGA said they were to focus on franchises like Sonic, Total War, Football Manager and Aliens, this wasn't a literal "these four and these four only statement" but rather these were the four major boxed titles SEGA West was releasing in 2012/2013 with Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed (UK developed, US/Europe released), Total War: Shogun 2 & Total War: Rome II (UK developed, US/Europe released), Football Manager 2013 (UK developed, US/Europe released) and Aliens: Colonial Marines (UK developed, US/Europe released).

Can I ask where the discussion is Barry? Would like to read it.

And we know that SEGA will not focus only on those brands, they've just picked up Company of Heroes along with Warhammer Fantasy and Warhammer 40k series.

What they have gone with is lose all the misses, go with the hits. It's sound judgement in such a harsh climate, even EA is playing it safe due to the recession that has hit many countires, in 2008 they produced something like 66 odd games, now it's about 21 games.

I personally think we will still see the odd SEGA Japan title here and there, but right now what SEGA seem to be doing is consolidating their business first and making decision that would be unpopular with the fanbase. However as long as they remember first and foremost, video games on consoles/PC is where they should be, I am fine going a year or two without the big new IP.

EDIT for Barry's edit: Nah, it has to do with catalogue sales (Probably stuff like Binary Domain and Sonic Generation) doing extremely well, further helped by both Yakuza 5 and Football Manager 2013 selling pretty well.

[Trippled]

For Arcades, it seems like the only game that is doing Money for a good while is Border Break. It seems that they banking for a while on the Otaku Audience with Shining Force Cross and Border Break.

Traditional Arcade games, haven't been seen for a while. 2009 was the last time we saw some like R-Tuned, HoTD EX or Hummer, and they probably failed pretty hard. If they do stuff like a Racing game, it should be made for PSN/XBLA directly.

[Nameless 24]

Very well documented!

Although sales of Total War and Football manager are very good, I am sure that SoJ's utput made them the other half of sales in Europe.

Which begs the question as to why Phanasy Star Online 2 hasn't been taken advantage of in the West yet with the amount of subs they have, and have not really tried to at least translate Valkyria Chronicles 3 on the PSN store if they fear it will bomb as a retail release.

I don't mind the "less is more" mentality since they are making money now, but SEGA really should advertise their games more...especially when Transformed made almost a million for them in the space of three months (since it launched at the end of November).

I fear that their forecasts won't make it if they are indeed sued by Level 5 over that patent and lose.

[ROJM]

--

Anybody think SEGA West trimming the fat* contributed to boxed titles being strong?

*shitty games that got poor scores and low sales

No, because the games posting the strongest sales are the same games posting the strongest sales over four years ago, mainly FOOTBALL MANAGER and TOTAL WAR(although TW sales wasn't mentioned in this report) Its been the same pattern for a while now, the PC titles having steady solid sales with a couple of SOJ titles(usually Sonic or YAKUZA) being the icing on the cake because of their periodically success whenever they are released. This also includes titles like PHANTASY STAR and KINGDOM CONQUEST as well which sales are mainly from Japan/asia side. It doesn't make a different on whether Sega had a big release schedule or a reduced one, the results are the same and that's been down to poor marketing on the lack of market success on some of the titles that could have easily been hits.
WARHAMMER and some of the Relic stuff will most likely become steam/digital exclusives much like with FBM and TW is starting to do.