Sega (2014-present)
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NOTE: DO NOT change "Qualities That Are Too Slow" to "Why It's Slow Nowadays" & "Fast Qualities" to "Redeeming Qualities" as while post-2014 Sega is not a bad company, they still have flaws for the reasons explained below. If it is changed, the editor will be dealt with.
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 Sega won't do what Nintendoes. Well, most of the time.
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Sega Corporation (Japanese: 株式会社セガ Hepburn: Kabushiki gaisha Sega) (stylized as 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 Sega 32X addon and the Sega Saturn and Dreamcast home 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. On August 17, 2023, they bought Rovio Entertainment for $78,000,000.
Qualities That Are Too Slow
In General
- Similar to Rockstar Games with the Grand Theft Auto series (since 2021), they used to only care about and milk the 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, Alex Kidd and Jewelpet (since May 2016, due to the failure of Attack Chance!?) 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 of 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 the constant pressure on the Sonic Team, some of the key members left 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 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 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.
- 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. Nintendo abandoned the deal when Sony planned to take all the SNES CD-ROM's profits. They went on to partner with Philips, creating the infamous Philips CD-i, 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 canceled it entirely claiming Sony doesn't know how to make hardware or software. This backfired 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.
- Even after they stopped making consoles, they still make re-releases of older consoles.
- They also keep relying on AtGames to make Sega Genesis/Mega Drive plug-and-play systems, which have mostly received negative reception.
- Their re-release of the Game Gear, the Game Gear Micro, goes to show how out of thought they are with making consoles for the sub-reasons listed below.
- It is far too small, which can make it difficult to use for people with large hands.
- There are four different versions each with only four games on them, and all of the games are different between the versions.
- Each version costs $50, which means that one will have to spend $200 just to get all 16 games.
- Despite Sega acknowledging their decline in quality, they still keep developing Sonic the Hedgehog games that feel lazy and uncreative in both gameplay and story due to them playing too safe. They also haven't been doing much to ease critiques about the franchise and mostly appeal to fans by making self-deprecating jokes at themselves and the Sonic franchise on social media (specifically through the Sonic the Hedgehog Twitter account currently run by Aaron Webber), 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 with built-in minigames, overall similar to the Mario Party franchise) or Sonic R (a racing game where nearly everyone races on foot). Sonic-themed racing games do still exist today through the Sonic and All-Stars Racing franchise and the mobile game Sonic Forces: Speed Battle, but Sonic fans still yearn for the day a Sonic R-style racing game comes out.
- 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) being rushed for the franchise's 15th anniversary, the holiday system, PS3's launch and Microsoft's contract, Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric being rushed to coincide with the Cartoon Network T.V. series, and Sonic Forces being rushed to come out the same year as the Nintendo Switch and to compete with Super Mario Odyssey.
- Speaking of Sonic Forces, Sonic Mania already came out the same year giving no reason whatsoever to release Sonic Forces.
- This also led to Sonic X-Treme being canceled entirely due to the developers gaining an illness over working too hard to complete it before Sega's demanded deadline.
- For their consoles, they rushed out the Sega Saturn four months earlier to come out before Sony's PlayStation. The result was an infamous launch that had a lackluster line-up of games, major retailers refusing to sell their consoles, and poor sales. Even with that early launch, the PlayStation was 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 (Shadow randomly appears to defeat his clone, then does nothing else aside from in the DLC Prologue, and Chaos gets defeated by Classic Sonic in a cutscene) along with other characters and two of the level designers never worked on a Sonic game before.
- 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.
- Along with Konami and Capcom, Sega doesn't care about bringing Latin American Spanish or Russian dubs for its games.
- They refused to localize most of the games in the Puyo Puyo series for no reason.
- They keep adding Denuvo DRM to their PC ports of games, despite Denuvo's terrible reputation.
- 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 franchise to death. The games have numerous glitches and lack of content, while the Olympics have a bad reputation nowadays.
- 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
- They gave the Wii U poor third-party support only 6 games were 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, and two of them (Yakuza 1 & 2 HD for Wii U and Puyo Puyo Tetris) were released only in Japan. After the failure of Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric, they stopped supporting the console. This isn't necessarily Sega's fault, though.
- Due to their exclusivity deal agreement with Nintendo, no Sonic games released for non-Nintendo consoles until Sonic Mania and Sonic Forces.
- During the Wii U era, they also sold off the Bayonetta publishing rights to Nintendo, which is probably why Bayonetta 2 and its sequels were never released outside of 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 only developed two games on the system: Mario & Sonic sequels that received mixed reviews from gamers alike, and some of their other Wii U games are pretty bad (with the exceptions 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 to Rise of Lyric but this is false mainly because of the timeline of the development of Sonic Forces consisting of 2013 to 2017.[1][2]
- They did re-release 7 GBA games, which were the Sonic Advance trilogy, the first two Shining Soul games, Shining Force: Kuroki Ryū no Fukkatsu and ChuChu Rocket, but none were released outside Japan.
- They didn't put their platforms on the Virtual Console, even though the Wii (Sega Master System and Sega Genesis) and 3DS (Game Gear) have Sega platforms.
- They even made a contract with JungleTac to make an official retro console based on JungleTac's infamous Zone series, which also happen to be Wii rip-offs.
- 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.[3]
Nowadays
- 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". This also contradicts Sonic Generations, where Classic Sonic was from the past.
- In addition, they constantly release their Genesis collections to just about every platform, while ignoring most of the other Sega consoles.
- Heck, they almost ruined Sonic Mania because of this. They forced the developers to 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.
- They've also been catering more toward the Classic Sonic fanbase as opposed to the Modern Sonic fanbase (people who 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 on 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. Sonic Frontiers was an improvement, but that's not saying much.
- They tried to make Super Sonic paid DLC in Sonic Forces. In Forces, Super Sonic is just invincible Sonic with infinite boost. Fortunately, they made him free DLC after consumer backlash.
- 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 quiet 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.
- In April 2021, they announced that in collaboration with double jump.tokyo Co., Ltd., will be selling NFTs, a financial security consisting of digital data stored in a blockchain (which uses cryptocurrency), most of them use 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.
- 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.
- Speaking of Sonic Frontiers (while good), the trailer for it was pretty lackluster from the graphical pop-ins, Sonic's abnormally slow speed, the empty feeling of the open world, and open zone location, all of these making the game trailer look 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 adjust the game's controls, why would they even used such a build for a trailer is beyond us.
The Only Fast Qualities
- 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.
- They made lots of good franchises such as Sonic the Hegdehog, Virtua Fighter, Virtua Tennis, House of the Dead, SEGA Rally Championship, Daytona USA, Crazy Taxi or BUG! and way more.
- After they purchased Rovio Entertainment, they managed to bring back the Angry Birds film series, by greenlighting a third film, projected for a 2025 release date and possibly bringing Angry Birds games on the console.
- They still have done very good films they've made, both in the United States, and their native Japan, including:
- The live-action Sonic the Hedgehog films.
- Jewelpet the Movie: Sweets Dance Princess
- Bayonetta: Bloody Fate
Reception
As stated above, Sega has received generally mixed reception for many reasons, including their near-disintegration throughout the 1990s with one console flop after another and Sony using the PlayStation 2 to force Sega to exit the domestic market in 2001. However they still were good till 2014.
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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References
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