Sega (2001-present)

NOTE: DO NOT Change "Qualities That Are Too SLOW!" To "Why It's SLOW! Nowadays" & ""Speed" Qualities" To "Redeeming Qualities" As While Post-2001 Sega is Not A Bad Company, They Still Have Flaws For Reasons Explained Below, If Someone Changes It, They Will Be Dealt With, Thank You For Not Changing It.

Sega
Sega won't do what Nintendoes. Well, most of the time.
Type: Subsidiary Founded: June 3, 1960 Founder: Martin Bromley Richard Stewart Headquarters: Shinagawa, Tokyo, Japan Key people: Haruki Satomi (Chairman and CEO) Shigeru Yamashita (Vice Chairman) Yukio Sugino (President and COO) Ian Curran (President, Sega​ of America) Gary Dale (President, Sega​ Europe) Parent: Sega Group Corporation Divisions: Sega development studios Subsidiaries: Amplitude Studios Atlus Creative Assembly Hardlight Ignited Artists Play Heart Relic Entertainment Sports Interactive Two Point Studios TMS Entertainment Rovio Entertainment Website: https://www.sega.com

Sega Corporation (Japanese: 株式会社セガ Hepburn: Kabushiki gaisha Sega) is a Japanese multinational video game developer and publisher headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, with multiple offices around the world.

Sega developed and manufactured numerous home video game consoles from 1983 to 2001, but the financial losses incurred from their 32X, Saturn, and Dreamcast consoles caused the company to restructure itself in 2001, and focus on providing software as a third-party developer from then on. In 2004, Sega merged with Sammy Ltd., a pachinko machine, hotel, and travel company and restructured itself again into a subsidiary of Sega Group Corporation, a part of Sega Sammy Holdings. In August 17, 2023, they have bought Rovio Entertainment.

Qualities That Are Too SLOW!

In General

1. Similar to Rockstar Games since 2021 with the Grand Theft Auto series, they used to only care about and milk Sonic the Hedgehog franchise to death and ignore most of their other franchises like Puyo Puyo, Samba de Amigo, Nights into Dreams, Ristar, VectorMan, ToeJam And Earl (which had a new game released in 2019 by the game's creator, without Sega's involvement), Phantasy Star and Alex Kidd and they're constantly pressured Sonic Team to make new Sonic the Hedgehog games every year. While they still support a few like Yakuza, Sonic the Hedgehog took way too much priority for Sega.
   • Speaking of the milking the Sonic the Hedgehog series, they also focus way too much on Sonic himself in recent games, while ignoring most of the other characters (even Tails), as they're reduced and downgraded to cameos and spin-offs (most notably Blaze, Silver and Cream) or they're easily forgotten (like Fang, Bean, Bark, Marine and Honey the Cat for example).
   • It also resulted in some the worst Sonic games ever made, most notably Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) and Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric.
   • In fact, they've even admitted that they only kept Sonic around for business reasons.
   • Due to their constant pressure on Sonic Team, some of the key members left from the company. Some of them like Yuji Naka ended up creating mediocre to terrible games for his own independent company Prope, and later moved on to Square Enix in 2018 where he directed the critical and commercial flop that was Balan Wonderworld.
   • Speaking of Sonic Team, whilst they were developing Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) and Sonic and the Secret Rings, they were also developing Sonic the Hedgehog Genesis and Sonic Riders which were both coming out the same year as Sonic the Hedgehog (2006). Sega had FOUR games in development and released THREE within a span of a year which is just outrageous and was a major factor for the previously mentioned departure of employees.
   • Conversely, Sega cares little about preserving older Sonic the Hedgehog games, as evidenced by the notoriously shoddy and rushed Sonic Colors Ultimate remaster, which was riddled with graphical errors and bugs comparable to Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) in terms of severity.
   • While not related to Sonic, they've also been ruining other franchises that they made too such as Super Monkey Ball with titles such as the infamous 2006 entry Adventure which many fans hated due to the poorly executed gameplay and janky mechanics that made it nearly unplayable at best and at worst a game that lacked nearly everything that the previous games had and what made them special to begin with in the first place, and since then, they began implementing several unnecessary gimmicks into the series that many fans weren't very big fans of, and when they re-released Banana Blitz, fans weren't too happy about it and were rather mixed with the HD remaster as a whole, but with the release of Banana Mania, the series has now returned back to its glory days and Sega doesn't seem to run the series into the ground anymore, unlike their flagship franchise Sonic which they are still doing it to this day.
2. Sega used to be a powerful first-party console developer that competed with Sony and Nintendo but constant conflicts between Sega of Japan and Sega of America and terrible mismanagement caused a large chain of flops that led to them restructuring themselves in 2001. Now, ironically, they release games for Nintendo and Sony consoles.
   • Speaking of Sony, Sega also helped to create the PlayStation. After Nintendo abandoned the deal to partner with Philips, Sony approached Sega and asked them the same offer to work on an add-on. While Sega of America agreed, Sega of Japan disagreed and cancelled it entirely claiming Sony doesn't know how to make hardware or software. This backfired horribly however, as it not only created the PlayStation brand but the PlayStation and PlayStation 2 outsold the Sega Saturn and Sega Dreamcast so badly that it pretty much sent Sega out of the console business.
3. Even after they stopped to make consoles, they still make re-releases of older consoles.
   1. They also keep relying on AtGames to make Genesis/Mega Drive plug-and-play systems, which mostly suck.
   2. Their re-release of the Sega Game Gear, called the "Sega Game Gear Micro", goes to show how out of thought they are with making consoles.
   3. It is far too small, which can make it difficult to use for people with large hands.
   4. There are four different versions each with only four games on them, and all of the games are different between the versions.
   5. Each version costs $50, which means that one will have to spend $200 just to get all 16 games.
4. Despite Sega acknowledging their decline in quality, they still keep developing Sonic games that feel lazy and uncreative in both gameplay and story due to them playing too safe. They've also haven't really been doing much to ease critiques about the franchise and mostly appeal to fans by making self-deprecated jokes at themselves and the Sonic franchise on social media, which is a very childish and unprofessional way to address their flaws.
   • On that topic, if they implement an idea into a Sonic game and it fails, Sega completely abandons that idea altogether and moves on to something else without refining the idea to make it better, like with Sonic Shuffle (a Sonic-themed party game) or Sonic R (a racing game where nearly everyone races on foot).
5. They've become notorious for their atrocious deadlines which serve no purpose or advantages towards their games other than to make a quick and easy profit. As mentioned in BQ #1, the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise has greatly suffered in quality because of this with notable examples being Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) for a 15th anniversary, PS3's launch and Microsoft's contract, Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric to coincide with the T.V series and recently Sonic Forces to either come out the same year as the Nintendo Switch or to compete with Super Mario Odyssey.
   • Speaking of the latter, Sonic Mania already came out that same year giving no reason whatsoever to release Sonic Forces.
   • This also led to Sonic X-Treme being cancelled entirely due to the developers gaining an illness over working to hard to complete it before Sega's demanded deadline.
   • For their consoles, they rushed out the Sega Saturn four months earlier in order to come out before Sony's PlayStation. The end result was a infamous launch that had a lackluster line-up of games, major retailers refusing to sell their console and poor sales. Even with that early launch, the PlayStation eventually released four months later and single-handedly outsold the Saturn within a single day, which is truly humiliating.
   • Learning nothing from BQ #1, Sega lied about Sonic Forces, as they advertised Shadow and Chaos in the trailer, along with "the team brought you Colors and Generations" quote (which was more likely an excuse to shove Wisps and Classic Sonic into it) while Shadow and Chaos appear in the game, they serve absolutely no purpose in the game along with other characters and two of the level designers never worked on a Sonic game before.
6. They've gained a habit of misusing their game and physics engines for the Sonic the Hedgehog games. The best examples of this are Sonic the Hedgehog Genesis, Sonic the Hedgehog 4, Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric and even the recent Sonic Forces which all suffered from clunky physics and severe amounts of bugs and glitches due to their poorly optimized game engines.
7. Along with Konami and Capcom, Sega doesn't care about bringing Latin American Spanish or Russian dubs for its games.
8. They refused to localize most of the games in the Puyo Puyo series for Absolutely NO REASON!
9. Apart from Sonic X, they censor Sonic and other characters' feet for an unknown reason. A good example is the Mario and Sonic Olympic at the Olympic Games series, where the Sonic Characters wear shoes while swimming, surfing, karate where the rest of them were barefoot (excluding Eggman starting in 2020 Tokyo). This is also seen in Sonic Forces where you can't give your avatars an option without shoes completely, not to mention the stupid foot censorship of Sticks in the Sonic Boom episode "Designated Heroes", ironically, they did not impose censorship on games made for their systems during the 16-bit era, unlike Nintendo, who did impose censorship then but began relaxing footwear censorship in the mid-2010s.
10. They keep adding Denuvo DRM to their PC ports of games, despite Denuvo's terrible reputation
11. They seem to ignore fan requests for a true Mario and Sonic crossover game, as they keep milking the Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games to death. The games have numerous glitches and lack of content, while the Olympics have a bad reputation nowadays.
12. Except for Football Manager, they sold their entire 2K Sports franchise to Take-Two Interactive.
    • One reason for the sale was because NFL 2K5 (which, to this day, is often considered the greatest NFL video game of all time) was sold for $20, and Electronic Arts had acquired an exclusive license with the league.

Back Then

1. They gave the Wii U a poor third-party support, in fact, only 6 games to be published by them: Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed, Yakuza 1 & 2 HD for Wii U, The Cave, Sonic Lost World, Puyo Puyo Tetris and the mentioned Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric, which Yakuza 1 & 2 HD for Wii U and Puyo Puyo Tetris were released only in Japan, they discontinued to support the console after the failure of Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric.
   • Due to their exclusivity deal agreement with Nintendo, this caused no Sonic games released for non-Nintendo consoles until Sonic Mania and Sonic Forces.
   • During the Wii U era, they've also sold off their Bayonetta publishing rights to Nintendo, this is probably also why Bayonetta 2 and its sequels ended up never released outside Nintendo platforms, as a result, they've only released remastered versions of the original game for PC, PS4 and Xbox One.
   • It also doesn't help that they developed only two games on the system which were only Mario & Sonic sequels that received mixed reviews from gamers alike, and that some of their Wii U games are pretty bad with the expections of Puyo Puyo Tetris and Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed, which had pretty good ports on the Wii U, with the other games just being plain horrible to begin with, mainly Rise of Lyric which nearly destroyed the franchise's reputation due to its very low sales and being a reboot that turned out badly and rushed with a change of equipment and abrupt time and also adapt the game to the Wii U and its series is ironically better received although it has mixed reviews, it was also rumored that a Hiatus was provoked due Rise of Lyric but this is false mainly because of the timeline of the development of Sonic Forces consisting of 2013 to 2017.
   • They did re-release 7 GBA games, which they are Sonic Advance Trilogy, the first two Shining Soul games, Shining Force: Kuroki Ryū no Fukkatsu and ChuChu Rocket, but they were not released outside Japan.
   • They didn't put their platforms on the Virtual Console, which the Wii (Sega Master System and Sega Genesis) and 3DS (Game Gear) have, but not the Wii U.
2. They even made a contract with JungleTac to make an officially released retro console based on JungleTac's infamous Zone series, which also happen to be Wii rip-offs.
3. In 2012, they abused the DMCA to take down videos discussing the Shining Force series, even if the videos had no gameplay of the games in question, likely to increase search traffic for their trailers for the then-latest installment in the series, Shining Ark.
   • This caused the late TotalBiscuit to boycott all Sega products, from 2012 to 2017.

Nowadays

1. They focused too much on nostalgia (most notably the Genesis/Mega Drive Sonic games, thanks for the Sonic Generations'' success), going as far as throwing Classic Sonic in Sonic Forces right after Sonic Mania was released. Even the long-time fans of the franchise are now bored of the constant nostalgia-pandering.
   • Also, their excuse to add Classic Sonic in Forces is extremely lame: "He comes from another dimension".
   • In addition, they constantly release their Genesis collections to just about every platform, while ignoring most of the others.
   • Heck, they even almost ruined Sonic Mania because of this. They made the developers keep adding levels from the Genesis trilogy like Hydrocity Zone and Lava Reef Zone (which thankfully are completely overhauled with new level layouts, new enemies (alongside the old), new bosses, and new mechanics that weren't present in the original versions, but still). Fortunately, five new zones still made it into the final game. (citation needed)
   • They've also been catering more towards the Classic Sonic fanbase as opposed to the Modern Sonic fanbase (people who actually like the Modern Sonic games). As a result, starting from Sonic Generations (and a little bit in Sonic Colors) despite being good, the Modern Sonic era began to notice a dip in quality over the years due to more emphasis towards just the platforming and slowing the pace of Sonic's speed. Sonic Forces was a perfect example of how much the Modern Sonic era downgraded due to this.
2. They tried to make Super Sonic paid DLC in Sonic Forces. Fortunately, they made him free DLC after the backlash. Not to mention, It was an On-Disc DLC
3. When Phantasy Star Online 2 was released, they announced an English localization for a 2014 release, but did little else about localization news, and even kept quite about it, going as far as deleting their US page for the game. Fortunately, Microsoft bribed them to change their minds once again as the localization was re-announced at E3 2019.
4. In April 2021, they announced that in collaboration with double jump.tokyo Co., Ltd., they will be selling NFTs, an financial security consisting of digital data stored in a blockchain (which used crytocurrency), most of them used Ethereum which makes it very harmful to the environment. The irony here is that Sonic the Hedgehog has had themes of environmentalism. Luckily, this decision was reversed as a result of significant backlash.
5. Like Rockstar Games, Sega has decided to delist several emulated re-releases of Sonic 1, Sonic 2, Sonic CD and Sonic 3 & Knuckles from older digital storefronts in light of the release of the Sonic Origins collection. Exceptions for these re-releases are the 3DS, Switch, iOS, Android versions and Sonic 2 through the SEGA Genesis - Nintendo Switch Online app for Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pack members.
   • Speaking of Sonic Origins, Sega has decided to lock certain features in it, like extra hard missions and animations, via pre-order bonuses/DLC packs. That's right, key features locked behind DLC for a compilation of remasters of 30+ year old games.
6. Speaking of Sonic Frontiers (while good), the trailer for it was pretty lackluster from the graphical pop ins, Sonic abnormally slow speed, and the empty feeling to the open world, open zone location, all of these making the game trailer looked like a tech demo, what's more baffling was that it was revealed that this was due to said trailers using an early build of it and using a mechanic they adjusts the game's controls, why would they even used such a build for a trailer is beyond us.

"Speed" Qualities

1. Despite their flaws, SEGA is still an amazing company that generally makes good games, and is completely tolerant of fan games, especially compared to Nintendo.

Videos

An ironic commercial considering the colored screen is why the Game Gear was a failure while the Game Boy was one of the most successful consoles ever.

A Sega Saturn commercial trying to mock the PlayStation, the console that ended up killing the Saturn.

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