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Let’s Console Sega
By Shane | May 17, 2008
Don Reisinger on the CNET digital blog: The Digital Home wrote a lengthy article on Why Sega should release a new console last Friday. It’s been known for a while now that Sega is in fact in hot water. Their loss for 2008 came in at a staggering $501 million and its video games division are in the red by $56.3 million. This comes as no surprise as they haven’t made a profit for quite some time.
While Don raised some good points, I would have to disagree with Sega releasing a new console. Even the Xbox, Xbox 360, PS2 and PS3 took a huge hit and made not a single profitable penny when they first came out. With Sega’s reported losses, how could the company compete with that? Commenter “spamthisyouass” had this to say, which I think pretty much sums it up:
No way Don… Sorry.. After buying the 32X add-on to the Genesis, and the Sega CD for the Genesis, and then watching the failure of the Saturn and Dreamcast , there is NO WAY people would buy the latest Sega Console. Too much bad blood, too many failures, too many pieces of hardware that are now doorstops. Sega is a rotting corpse of a company that was once king. Sega is dead… long live Sega.
I too am the average 30-35 gamer and I had a Genesis. I want Sega to do well don’t get me wrong. If they were to make a bold move and release a new console at a competitive price with decent titles, I would support them. They did well back in the day, but the Genesis had to fight with the SNES and its plethora of killer titles. The Dreamcast was too expensive and didn’t have the games to back it up nor a huge distribution in North America.
So what’s the answer for Sega? I say swallow your losses and your ‘video game giant’ mentality - stick with selling games or pocket what’s remaining and go Golfing.
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Comment by Richard Windsor — May 17, 2008 @ 9:11 am
If Sega were to ever release another console it would have to have some kind of revolutionary aspect to it, plus it would need to be similar to other consoles in architecture so they can get most of the multi-platform games. I loved my Genesis and my Dreamcast, but with the market as saturated as it is I just don’t see this ever happening. Add on the fact that their first party development teams only put out one good game out of 5 and you can just see why things would not work.
Comment by Paul Munn — May 17, 2008 @ 2:13 pm
Unless they have a strong stable of exclusive franchises there’s no reason to put out their own console and try and build their hardware brand reputation back from zero.
Comment by Shane — May 17, 2008 @ 3:22 pm
I’ll admit, I even “switched” to the SNES when I had my Genesis because, well…it didn’t have Mario or Zelda.
Comment by Nat — May 17, 2008 @ 8:24 pm
The answer?
Re-release the Dreamcast and open up the architecture. I still have a few games for the console, but no console in my hands. I also think that in Japan there are still 2-3 games being released for it yearly.
I still have my Ikaruga import.
Comment by Shane — May 20, 2008 @ 10:38 am
Hey Matt!
Seriously? There are still games being released for this system? Yowser.