SEGA of America Shutting Its Doors

[Cth]

http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/rlf43/sega_of_america_is_closing_its_doors/

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=468412
$96 million loss (@ $60 mill writedown from cancelled projects)

http://i.imgur.com/LrWFf.png

[Jason California]

What will be different now, other than some people not working?

[I've Got the Monkeys]

didn't they do that after the dreamcast?

[Slewo.O]

Well that sucks. Hopefully things could turn around. Sorry to see Sega has gone so low.

[Chunky Ink]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1P_wheTR0Ro

[capntightpants]

Man, childhood me is really depressed.

[Hate_Prime]

Sega does what Nintendon't. :(

[joeAR]

Sega does what Nintendon't. :(

Go out of business?

[Cth]

update:

Due to the challenging economic climate and significant changes within the interactive gaming industry, SEGA has made the decision to consolidate its publishing business in order to focus on developing digital content and driving its existing IP such as Sonic the Hedgehog, Total War, Football Manager and the Aliens franchise. This realignment of the business around existing and digital IP is a necessity to ensure that SEGA continues to invest and enhance its digital business offering, whilst reducing its reliance on traditional packaged goods.

As a result of the SEGA Sammy Board decision to consolidate the business, many of our internal functions will be re-structured and this could result in a number of redundancies within the publishing business across the Western organisation. The company will be entering into a re-structure phase to reflect the unprecedented change in our industry and to move the company forward appropriately.

The changes will position SEGA as a content led organisation, maximising sales with a strong and balanced IP portfolio across both packaged and digital distribution. The management team are confident that the proposed restructure will benefit the company and make it fit for purpose within the changing nature of the industry over the coming years.

--

"the QA department has been hit hard, being completely shut down for North America. SEGA Europe will be covering QA for the remaining SEGA titles. Additionally, positions in marketing, design, social, and development have also seen layoffs. "

[Lineofdeath2]

Does this dash any hopes for a Sonichu game?

[The Robot Lord of Tokyo]

Sega could have still been a huge name in gaming if it hadn't of pushed away developers with the complex programming of the Saturn. They were never able to recover after that. It's a shame. The Dreamcast had a lot of potential and was a fun system.
And once they got out of hardware, I think they underestimated the strength of their franchises. Putting out several crappy Sonic games didn't help either.

[russw]

Pours out 40

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaxxon

[Jason California]

Wait. This means there won't be anymore commercials with the CEO character,doesn't it? He's pretty funny.

That's is about the only way Ithink this affects me.

[Jason California]

Nope.

That's the PlayStation CEO . Everything is ok

[Thudpucker]

Nope.

That's the PlayStation CEO . Everything is ok

The Playstation CEO is making SEGA commercials?

[Kurt Russell Crowe]

the Playstation commercials will probly be hacked anyway, someone from Sega could show up in one

[Jason California]

The Playstation CEO is making SEGA commercials?

No. I am not a gamer. When I first read the news I briefly thought Kevin Butler was a Sega commercial character. I thought about it for a secon, and then remembered he was a character of Playstation.


http://youtu.be/kaVsmnpEtE0

[A.Huerta]

Dreamcast was one of the best systems ever. I still don't get why it didn't do well

[joeAR]

Dreamcast was one of the best systems ever. I still don't get why it didn't do well

I adored the Dreamcast but Sega had burned a few bridges with 3rd party developers at that point. It did well until the Ps2 was announced. The Playstation name and a builtin DVD player were enough to get people excited about the PS2. Hell for the first 6 months of the Ps2's life game sales were very down. People were mainly buying it for the DVD player

[killingyouguy]

update:

Due to the challenging economic climate and significant changes within the interactive gaming industry, SEGA has made the decision to consolidate its publishing business in order to focus on developing digital content and driving its existing IP such as Sonic the Hedgehog, Total War, Football Manager and the Aliens franchise. This realignment of the business around existing and digital IP is a necessity to ensure that SEGA continues to invest and enhance its digital business offering, whilst reducing its reliance on traditional packaged goods.

As a result of the SEGA Sammy Board decision to consolidate the business, many of our internal functions will be re-structured and this could result in a number of redundancies within the publishing business across the Western organisation. The company will be entering into a re-structure phase to reflect the unprecedented change in our industry and to move the company forward appropriately.

The changes will position SEGA as a content led organisation, maximising sales with a strong and balanced IP portfolio across both packaged and digital distribution. The management team are confident that the proposed restructure will benefit the company and make it fit for purpose within the changing nature of the industry over the coming years.

--

"the QA department has been hit hard, being completely shut down for North America. SEGA Europe will be covering QA for the remaining SEGA titles. Additionally, positions in marketing, design, social, and development have also seen layoffs. "

So Sega is doing what every movie/game/comic/pop culture company is doing, then. Focusing only on the franchises people already know to the detriment of originality, experimentation, and pushing a medium forward. Yay world.

[A.Huerta]

I adored the Dreamcast but Sega had burned a few bridges with 3rd party developers at that point. It did well until the Ps2 was announced. The Playstation name and a builtin DVD player were enough to get people excited about the PS2. Hell for the first 6 months of the Ps2's life game sales were very down. People were mainly buying it for the DVD player

I forgot about the DVD stuff. Yeah, I think that did it.

[Matt Jay]

Are these the guys that have been making the crappy Marvel movie tie-ins? It's a shame this happens when their last effort, Captain America, was actually pretty good.

[Andrew]

Hell for the first 6 months of the Ps2's life game sales were very down.

It probably didn't help that during those first 6 months, it seemed like 90% of the PS2's gaming library was sports games.

[Len Ford]

I adored the Dreamcast but Sega had burned a few bridges with 3rd party developers at that point. It did well until the Ps2 was announced. The Playstation name and a builtin DVD player were enough to get people excited about the PS2. Hell for the first 6 months of the Ps2's life game sales were very down. People were mainly buying it for the DVD player

This combined with how easy it was to pirate games for the system quickly led to the end of the Dreamcast. It sucked because it was a fun system and had a number of great games on it.

[The Robot Lord of Tokyo]

This combined with how easy it was to pirate games for the system quickly led to the end of the Dreamcast. It sucked because it was a fun system and had a number of great games on it.

I tend to be neutral on the pirating issue but this was one of the times where pirating pissed me off badly. This system should have had another couple of years of life in it and it was all cut short because of lack of profits caused by pirating.

I will give Sega tons of credit, though. Despite not having massive 3rd party support for the Dreamcast, their own studios stepped up and delivered some amazingly innovative and well executed games.

It was probably their own games success that made them believe they could just only be a software developer. And then they lost that innovation and spark and just kept pumping out the same things over and over again.

My biggest thing that I owe Sega, though, is that through the Saturn it would be my first venture online to the internet. The modem/browser add on helped get me into a world of information that I had no prior access to before.

[Petey Parker]

I tend to be neutral on the pirating issue but this was one of the times where pirating pissed me off badly. This system should have had another couple of years of life in it and it was all cut short because of lack of profits caused by pirating.

I will give Sega tons of credit, though. Despite not having massive 3rd party support for the Dreamcast, their own studios stepped up and delivered some amazingly innovative and well executed games.

It was probably their own games success that made them believe they could just only be a software developer. And then they lost that innovation and spark and just kept pumping out the same things over and over again.

My biggest thing that I owe Sega, though, is that through the Saturn it would be my first venture online to the internet. The modem/browser add on helped get me into a world of information that I had no prior access to before.

I'm a huge Sega fan but lack of quality games killed the Dreamcast, not pirating. Yes Sega had great games and Capcom was in there as well with quite a few awesome games like RE and MvC 1 and 2 but otherwise 3rd party support was practically non existant. Outside of games like Soul Calibur and a few others, unless it was a Sega or Capcom game, it probably wasn't worth playing. Add in Sony coming along with the PS2 and Sega's days were done :(

[The Robot Lord of Tokyo]

I'm a huge Sega fan but lack of quality games killed the Dreamcast, not pirating. Yes Sega had great games and Capcom was in there as well with quite a few awesome games like RE and MvC 1 and 2 but otherwise 3rd party support was practically non existant. Outside of games like Soul Calibur and a few others, unless it was a Sega or Capcom game, it probably wasn't worth playing. Add in Sony coming along with the PS2 and Sega's days were done :(

I'm sure that Sega would have been forgiven for the Sega Cd/32X mess as long as the Saturn would have delivered easier developer kits to all of the manufacturers. It doesn't matter how powerful a system is if it's a nightmare to program for. Had it been easier to program for, they might have been able to get developers to make their games for all platforms.

The Dreamcast paid for Sega's past sins. The lack of third party was pretty rough. Pirating was one of the final nails in the coffin.

It's kind of funny because the PS3 had similar issues when it came out because it also was hard to program for. If not for having a Bluray player from the start to tide people over until better developer kits were made, the PS3 and Sony might have been in worse shape then they are now. Then again, if they had no Bluray player in each system then they might not have lost as much money on every system sold.

[Weeto]

Sega made a huge mistake by not getting enough companies on board as third party developers.

Sega's titles were good but you can't get anywhere on consoles without the likes of EA on board. I think many gamers thought Dreamcast wasn't going to be good because so many big name titles were missing although there was generally a decent equivilant available for the Dreamcast.

Sega worked quite closely with Microsoft on the Dreamcast and it is fairly obvious that the Dreamcast was basically a prototype Xbox, especially when you look at the fact that Sega worked on many launch and close post launch Xbox titles. Many of the Dreamcast's features were carried over, even the strange shape of the Xbox's original joypad is similar to the rounded shape of the Dreamcast pad.

Sega is still very much around, as most of their stuff was programmed in Japan anyway and they still publish some other cool stuff like Football Manager.

[oconnellmd]

Sega!!!