Believe it or not, Sega, of all publishers, has been one of the most consistent in releasing quality games at a good clip, and they have more coming down the pipeline. It’s easy to look at the recent success of certain Sonic the Hedgehog titles, but don’t forget that they were the ones who published games like Unicorn Overlord, Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance, Metaphor ReFantazio, and more. Yet, despite those successes across all the developers under their banner, they are still having issues on the sales front.
Specifically, while the games they release are doing well, they’re not doing as well as they COULD be doing, and according to Sega, during an investor Q&A, the reason might be that some titles cause players to “hold back” on getting them due to “definitive editions” coming out not too long after:
“While we haven’t been able to pinpoint a precise cause of [the lower-than-expected sales performance], we believe the problem also lies in our marketing, which wasn’t able to sufficiently convey the appeal of our games to users.”
Now, obviously, the publisher doesn’t do this with all of its games, as it’s mainly Atlus that has done this in the past, but it has “upgraded” games after a while, such as a recent game featuring Sonic and Shadow the Hedgehog. With games being more of a “luxury” than ever before, you can understand why some would be hesitant to buy things on “day one” versus waiting a while and getting the “definitive edition” later, and thus getting all the best content.
It’ll be interesting to see how Sega adapts to this issue going forward.
Source: Automation
