No SEGA Booth at E3 2015

[Nz17]

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,” a representative told us via email. “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.

Source: http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2015/05/04/sega-will-not-have-its-own-booth-at-e3-2015.aspx

Ladies and gentlemen, I think we finally might be seeing the last years of SEGA. I know, I know, Sammy acquired/merged with SEGA a few years ago, and it is currently undergoing a restructuring. But to use an analogy, I think this is a sign that the last air is exiting the balloon. I think SEGA could just end up being another label on a box like Atari and Sierra Online did.

It's widely speculated that SEGA is going to publish a major Sonic game next year for his series' 25th anniversary, but who knows: that could be the last SEGA-developed Sonic game ever made. Another publisher might acquire the company for the Intellectual Property rights and continue publishing Sonic and other SEGA games, but the development would probably be done by outside devs to which the new IP owner would contract the work.

[PreZZ]

Thats weird... they just acquired atlus, which is bigger than sega nowadays!

[Rickstilwell1]

Hmm, maybe somebody else could do Sonic better and do Sonic right.

[otaku]

as a sega fan this makes me sad they had a good shot and some success post hardware and with the sammy/atlus stuff those were good things I thought but yeah the future does not look bright and poor sonic could use better treatment than a simple cash cow status he has now. Time will tell.

[The 1 2 P]

I'm not that surprised about the E3 announcement. As for Sonic, I think Sammy/Sega really need to license the franchise out to Nintendo for a few years. That's one of the only ways I can see that series ever being successfully revived.

[Flojomojo]

So no one is going to speculate that

Sega is dying
Consoles are dying
Games are dying
Conferences are dying
?

I'm simultaneously impressed and disappointed.

[Tanooki]

Maybe people are just indifferent to Sega at this rate due to years of mostly floundering, fouling or ignoring franchises, and then taking a sharper interest in touch gaming. If this was new this year them doing all that, not just bailing on E3, I think you'd have a Fuck Sega thread right next to the Konami one.

[FieryReign]

They've been dead in my eyes for years now. Aside from their 3DS arcade ports, nothing from them interests me. I assumed they were just a label on the box nowadays.

[sfchakan]

They started doing this retarded shit where someone in their corporate HQ thought it was wise to focus on their "Core" franchises. Things they were known for. So they stopped doing awesome things like publishing Platinum Games' games (which all mostly rocked) and instead just put out Aliens, RTS, Football Manager, Sonic, and Hatsune Miku games.

Unfortunately, not everyone is into those products. When Aliens didn't sell enough to pay for the shortcomings of the other products, they pissed and moaned about it only selling over 2 million units. They did the same thing when Bayonetta sold over 2 million units. Let's blame the better performing products, obviously! Time to focus on mobile games now, right guys?!?

It's such a shame. They have so many quality IPs they could mine if they just partnered with the right people.

[Tanooki]

Yeah that's the same stupid argument SquareEnix pissed off a lot of people with when they had the audacity to call 4M copies of Tomb Raider (pre PS4 upgrade release) a failure that didn't meet sales projections so they turned a loss for the year. In what circles of hell would someone have to consider 4M copies of a game sold over PS3/360/PC a failure?! Most developers would be kissing peoples ass if they sold 400K copies let alone 4M of them and being grateful with the mass of games popping out daily fighting for the coin (especially when many are cheaper priced downloads too.) I think a lot of the old guard have just lost their mind in various ways from doing asininely huge budgets, overly playing it safe, calling multi-million sellers a bomb, the living by the wire and dying by the garrote if just one nameworthy game fails (legitimately.) Stuff like that needs to be stopped, people need to step back, and start looking at better ways to budget, construct and release those physical games because a system where a game like Tomb Raider is a failure is 100% non-sustainable.

[FieryReign]

What studies are these companies doing, where they think the ENTIRE future of gaming relies on mobile shit? The majority of these games are pure garbage. I don't see it happening. I don't live in Japan. Stop acting like the rest of the world follows what they do. We're not going to all of a sudden say "fuck console and portable games, I'm sticking with Angry Birds!"

It must be really easy and cheap to develop for phones. Oftentimes developers break or completely fuck their apps up when they "update" them. I can't even count how many times I've uninstalled apps after these so-called "updates" completely ruined them. That is not a future I look forward to...

[WCP]

Wasn't the first e3 20 years ago ?


That's when Sega did the surprise Saturn launch, that many blame for their demise. ( I personally believe it was only one of many factors )


It's amazing to think that 20 years later, they aren't even showing up to the conference.

[Tron 2.0]

They've been dead in my eyes for years now. Aside from their 3DS arcade ports, nothing from them interests me. I assumed they were just a label on the box nowadays.
Pretty much how i see sega these days.I'm still waiting on yakzua 5 digital release and i wonder if zero will make it over here at all.

[Niku-Sama]

after sonic boom I can understand this.

E3 has never been good for or had good decisions made by sega at.







yes english

[CDiablo]

It must be really easy and cheap to develop for phones.

These games cost peanuts to make and don't take a ton to make their money back. Everyone is in the race for the next mobile gaming fad cause you can make console game profits on a game that cost 1/50 of the cost of a console game. Sega/Sammy I believe still has a large market for pachinko machines.

[Tanooki]

They so, Sammy is huge on the pachinko circuit and more or less gave up on gaming entire. Sega in the merger brought them back into gaming, as much in their publishing a lot and internal halfassed(mostly) product has carried them to this point and decision. Sega has been like some form of zombie juju just lumbering around and dead but not which is likely why this is a blip on the radar of most people outside of die hard Sega fan sites/boards while the Konami thing downright pissed people off as it was a shock.

[kai123]

Mobile is the future...please pay $4.99 to try again or wait 7 hours.


I guess I won't get another PSO again for a very long time. I swear sega could have killed Monster Hunter if they would have just kept the soul of the orginal PSO games and ported them to handhelds...not mobile.

[PreZZ]

I dont know how they managed to fuck up the transition from being a console maker dev to going third party, everybody feared SEGA would become the biggest dev-publisher. They had so many great studios and ip's...

[sfchakan]

Yeah, just look at all of the great development teams they had during and right after the Dreamcast's time. It all went poof practically overnight. AM2, hitmaker, Overworks/Wow, Smilebit, Sonic Team, Team Andromeda, and UGA all had quality games out during that time period.

[Tanooki]

I do not think Sega screwed it up so bad, but their Sammy puppetmasters did. Theyre just not that into games orthinking wisely about them as they are gambling devices like pachinko. Sega started out ok, even if some of their choices in putting an IP on here but not there tactics did piss some off. Once Sammy got into it they went more into publishing and further larger scale sucking.

I agree about a dedicated PS handheld, the one on the DS of all things was damn good. It always handled far better with camera and control than monster hunter could ever hope to.

[Nz17]

I guess I won't get another PSO again for a very long time. I swear sega could have killed Monster Hunter if they would have just kept the soul of the orginal PSO games and ported them to handhelds...not mobile.

Personally, I found what I played of the Japanese version of Phantasy Star Online 2 to be an abomination. It lacked all of the class and coolness of the original Phantasy Star Online v1 and v2. But if anyone really wants to play an official PC version of Phantasy Star Online 2 in English, there is always the Singaporean version (http://pso2.playpark.com/sg/gameguide/6272).

Furthermore, I found Phantasy Star 0 (Zero) on the DS to be superb. You could really feel the influence of the LUNAR character designer and developers in Phantasy Star Zero. Plus it had such an excellent localization! If I were to have a game localized, I would hire the group which handled PSZ's translation & localization. It had such great writing/editing! And the music and story-boarding were great too.

I didn't have the hardware to play Phantasy Star Universe (the series) at the time of its release, but it looked terrible to me then and people at the time who I knew who really liked PSO told me it was quite bad. It looked so lame, I won't go back to buy nor play that spinoff series even now.

However, Phantasy Star Portable 1 and Phantasy Star Portable 2 on the PSP actually were pretty freakin' good from the demos I played which I had downloaded from PSN, so I'm definitely looking forward to playing those one day. As an extra, you can carry your saves from the demos of PSP1 and PSP2 into the full releases of Phantasy Star Portable 1 & 2, so there are no worries about "wasting" the time invested in the demos.

As for myself, I continue to hope that the lady-designer of the original Phantasy Star will one day make an awesome new JRPG. If Igarashi and Inafune can make new games similar to their most famous creations, then I don't see why Rieko Kodama can't do the same.

See also "The Results Are In! Here Are the Spiritual Successors You’d Most Like to See | The Chi-Scroller" (http://chi-scroller.com/2015/05/20/the-results-are-in-here-are-the-spiritual-successors-youd-most-like-to-see/).

[celerystalker]

The whole Sega of Japan/Sega of America not getting along aside, Sega screwed itself with its post-Dreamcast strategy. Teaming up with Microsoft out of their Windows CE-Dreamcast partnership to put out a lot of great exclusives on a system that took too long to hit its stride... Gunvalkyrie never stood a chance Jet Set Radio Future, even as a pack-in got swept away to time. Outrun sequels (at least some of those came to PS2), Shenmue II, Panzer Dragoon Orta... how much broader of an audience could they have found on PS2... and then taking Billy Hatcher, PSO, and Skies of Arcadia to Gamecube? The entire world knew the PS2 was the leader, and while those other systems have their pluses, they really cut themselves out of the biggest audience with that strategy, and slowly lost clout by not being able to produce numbers in that environment, making their properties worth less and less.

Not to mention the totally mishandled Sega Ages line... what a mix of garbage and awesome, and they put possibly the worst group possible (aside from that kick-ass Alien Storm remake) on a disc for the west, while leaving the killer Gain Ground remake, the beautiful Phantasy Star I and II remakes, Dragon Force, Gunstar Heroes Treaure Box, Monster World Collection, Galaxy Force, Dynamite Deka...

Sega was making all kinds of interesting stuff, but they just never figured out what to do with it.