SEGA Launces SEGA Link Pay for Play site

[SKVermin]

SEGA is launching a pay-for-play site that allows users to play classic SEGA games for a minimal fee. For 120 Yen (a little over $1.00 US) you get 24 hours play time on the game of your choice. There will also be multi-player games to play against other Link users, and the library is promised to reach 100 titles in the near future. There are currently 20 16-bit classics, including Phantasy Star III and Golden Axe.

It looks like the service may only be available to Japan, but it would be great to see something like this come to our side of the pond.

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=5685
http://segalink.jp/

[TeddyRuxpin]

It looks like the service may only be available to Japan, but it would be great to see something like this come to our side of the pond.[/url]

If Sega foregoes doing that, I think they'll be making a big mistake. With the popularity of the "TV Games" here they should make available a sort of PC version of that.

[sharp]

Sounds good, sadly even if they bring it over here I can't use it as it is windows based. Also I think it would be smarter to offer a flatrate to buy the rights to own a game forever. This as I won't pay a bit euro for playing a game 24 hours if I can get the cart for les then 5.

On the other hand tehre will be a market for this kind of services, also I like the in the article mentioned more expensive and recent games like PSO, Virtua Fighter 2 and Typing of the Dead. Hope for windows users they will bring something to the west, lthough I doubt they will do.

[TeddyRuxpin]

Also I think it would be smarter to offer a flatrate to buy the rights to own a game forever. This as I won't pay a bit euro for playing a game 24 hours if I can get the cart for les then 5.

The problem with flatrate is if you buy the game and then you don't like it..... you're stuck with it. Where as with $1 for 24 hours, if you play a game they offer for 5 minutes and if you hate it, you just switch to something else for the next 23 hours and 55 minutes. Assuming you stay awake for 24+ hours at a time LOL

Such services obvously won't be geared to big time collectors. It'll be more geared to (at least in USA) people with lots of money and very little intelligence to figure out it would be better and cheaper to buy the real thing.

[vulcanjedi]

Hmm

I still have a few of the sega downloads from 2 years ago bought from real arcade. Like toejam and earl. They shut off access to the ones you didn't own about a year ago. Actually on my one computer when I start real arcade I get the Sega sonic start. I was wondering why they cut them off. Guess they didn't want competition.

VJ