Sega to stop GameCube sports development

When will Sega ever learn. Sega should have went second party first to PS2, before going third party eventually. But I hope they pull things together.

Cause I still want to see Shenmue ending, after that, I don't care what happend to them.

 

I think Sega released to many games to quickly. I mean the turnaround time from Dreamcast to going 3rd party and releasing games seemed to be very fast. I just think they should have allowed for more time creating games rather than trying to please stock holders in the short term.

 

Arrogant because of the insane amount of rhetoric they injected into their 'little war' against EA. All their talk of defeating EA in X number of years and other such BS comments. They set themselves upto fail, and didn't disapoint.

Q, common now. IIRC, EA's Madden2003 outsold the sega equivalent [2k3] by a factor of like 5 or 10. It's insane. Sega sports lost descisivly in every area they pitted themselves against EA in. You don't talk shit unless you can pull it off - they clearly did not.

 

Brimstone: Most of 'em are ports. Now that they're just about out of old material to port they should slow down quite a bit.

Vince: Well Madden has the advantage of the sheer penetration of the Madden NAME. Good old Joe Schmo will be more likely to pick a game named after an old Am. Football hero and now announcer, than some no-name game (SEGA means nothing to Joe Schmo).

 

Gollum, what i posted is on www.the-magicbox.com

 

They lost in sales, the games themselves are almost consistently equal to or better than the competing EA offerings in most aspects, reviews often even gave them the edge. Questions is, will this quality ever be translated into sales in the US?

Thanks for the link Captain Howdy, that is the only place I found Xbox mentioned though, all other sources just mention exclusives, no word of any platform. We'll see what happens...

 

Everyone here knows that I'm a big Sega supporter, but I agree with Vince on this one: Sega should have kept their mouth shut. Their plans were too ambitious this year.

They still managed to sell about 15% of the football and basketball titles, which is a decent start. They can build on this next year, but they should scale back their marketing accordingly.

A couple of my friends bought Madden 2003 on PS2, but when they played NFL2K3 on my Xbox for a while they told me they would be getting NFL2K4 next year on whatever system they had. Solid marketing (but not $18 million worth) and some decent word of mouth will help Sega slowly reach the mass market.

 

Well they cant reach mass market on two of three consoles..they need all three. I love Sega to but thier business decsions are dumbass somtimes. If i ran a video game company I'd want the business decisions of Nintendo, the marketing ideas of Sony and the money of MS.

 

If Sega can't support GCN devlopment of their big sports titles on GCN then they deserve to just fold up and die as a company.

If you are porting a game between two platforms (PS2 and XBox), the development costs to move it to a third platform shouldn't be that significant. NBA 2k2 for example has sold around 60K on GCN. 60K isn't a large number of sales, but if Sega can't cover the costs of supporting a third platform based on 60K sales when the code base is already designed for multiplatform, they should just fold up shop and leave the gaming business.

 

What nfl2k game? or are sega assuming nobody in the uk would buy an american football game !!! grrr...... bit bloody "what sega sports games on gamecube" on this side of the pond
-dave-
must say i'm quite impressed with madden though,, except for the stupid memory card requirment... though thats solved with datels 64mb card

 

Vince, i don't agree it was "arrogant" at all to even think sega could compete with EA. It would be arrogant of EA to think that they will have no competition. Either way you look at it, console sports game sales are down this year. probably to so many eople buying sports games last year and not seeing a big difference between versions.

brayanb,

Now that's pretty harsh. it's more like if they continue to even bother with gamecube sports titles, they will fold up in die. the sports game market on game cube is VERY small as seen by EA sales and sega sports sales.

...and how would you know this exactly? it's significant enough that if you're only going to move 30,000 units, it's not worth the time and money.

That's just the thing. ALL the 2K2 games have sold better than the 2K3 games. To the point where they aren't going to make their money back on the gamecube ports. Your reaction sounds more like sour grapes then it does logical. EA has done the same thing in the past with the N64 and it wouldn't suprise me to see these games come out much later or not at all on gamecube.

 

Goldeni

Well sure you can. If you concetrate you resources on two out of three platforms, you can then take advantage of that hardware even better. While concetrating on making the best possible games for the largest sports market buying population.

Then once you start getting better sales, you can reutn to the third platform once it's user base has increased in size.

 

They have more chance of folding up and dying from there continued support of XBox then if they continue to produce a few multi-platform sports games on GameCube.

Sega Sales from January 2002 to August 2002:

PS2:

Games sold = 944,000

Sports titles sold = 582,000

GameCube:

Games sold = 706,500

Sports titles sold = 136,500

XBox:

Games sold = 358,000

Sports titles sold = 228,000

The difference between sports game sales on XBox and GameCube isn't that significant when you consider that overall Sega sold twice as many games on GameCube then XBox.

Even with the poorer sports sales GameCube still has average sales per game of 78,500 in those 8 months while XBox has a average of only 51,142 per game in the same time period.. those are the sort of sales that can sink Sega.

Keeping the GameCube sports titles coming is worth it just to show support to GameCube. Because any big lack of support from Sega (like cutting off sports titles) could piss off the fans of there second biggest Platform!

BTW, I suppose if you think Sega should drop sports titles from GameCube you also think they should drop all none sports games from XBox? Because none sports games from sega on XBox only sold 130,000 in those 8 months. That's worse then sports title sales on GameCube

 

Teasy,



I'm not suprised to see you reply, since you always come to the cubes rescue. i'm going to make one comment about your argument and then reutrn to topic, since whenever you make posts like this, the thread quickly degenerates into something completely OFF topic. I'll put it in bold so you see it and actually read my response before cutting and pasting while trying to reply to everysentance.

You keep showing these numbers for the xbox (non sports) game sales and how poor they are. Well there's one factor you keep forgetting. That being that Microsoft paid for the development of those non sports (exclusive) titles. So there was minimum risk when it came to sega loosing money on the development costs. You're forgetting all the cash MS paid sega a while back for those titles. So while those games didn't sell well, they also didn't cost sega lot's of cash. So, if you want to use that as your argument for WHY sega should drop support of non sports titles for Xbox, go ahead. However, from a money making point of view you're argument doesn't hold much water.

I however am not going to continue discussing it beyond this post.

Once again you're completely missing the point. The sports market is HUGE, we're only talking about the sports games here. So showing total games sold is pointless when we're ONLY talking about the sports titles. The august numbers don't even reflect the current sales of the 2k3 sports titles from sega, so why bother?

Ya know, jsut as a reminder, I'd really like it if you could stay on topic when you respond. Instead of draggin this into another one of your "gamecube is better" arguments.

For one thing, we're talking ONLY about sports titles here Teasy! Sega didn't say they were dropping ALL game support for cube! Only sports game support. Stick to the topic please.

Now, how can you say it's not significant when there's a 50% difference between the sports titles sold from Xbox to cube? Even still those numbers don't relfect the 2K3 sports titles where the sales on Gamecube are even "lower" than Xbox.

It's not "worth it" if those titles aren't selling and you have to pay for the ENTIRE costs of development! Showing "support" doesn't mean shit if the games don't make enough money to pay for the port.

Second biggest platform where? In North America? Nope. In europe? That remains to be seen. No matter what way you look at it, Sega (a japanese company) has always done better appealing to the north american and european markets compared to japan. The sports market in Japan is tiny in comparrison to the other two regions. It's also why EA barely sells any sports titles inside of japan. The sports divisions of both companies are targetting Europe and North america for the most part. So leaving japan out of this equation makes perfect sense, and if japan is out of the picture, which console is the second biggest platform?

Now about pissing off gamecube fans, I'm onyl going to comment on this once since you won't like it. Working for a publisher i see lot's of titles and have a good idea of what most develoeprs are working on. We have a big dtabase with a few hundread develoeprs looking for publishers. It shows what tiles they are working on and what paltforms they are supporting. I can tell you right now, that Gamecube support from the majority of these developers are pretty minimal. For the most part you see PS2, Xbox, and sometimes PC, when they are working on multiplatform titles. Moving into 2003 and 2004, I think there's going to be a LOT of "pissed off" gamecube fans unfortunatly.

You're completely missing the point! Did Sega say they were dropping non sports game support for xbox? No, they didn't. We're actually discussing the reasons WHY sega would do something like this, because it actually appears they are. I'm not interested in another "I'm just defending the gamecube" argument of yours. now when you're completely forgettig how much cash MS paid sega for the developement of those titles. Now back to reality, and back to topic please...

 

Um, thats the point I was making. Sega was arrogant for the huge amount of rhetoric they put out their about overtaking EA in X year(s) and the imminent death of EA. It was a bullshit comment to begin with for the exact reason that you said.

Q,

How is it not arrogant to littlerly declare their own little vendetta against EA, claim that their death is imminent and then get utterly destroyed by EA? Maybe it pumped up a few of their fanboys, but How does that look to their investors? Arrogance is an understantment - and their finacial results bear this out.

 

I don't care I never bought, and don't plan to buy any sport title.

I find them completely stupid, except those which aren't realistic, those are funs, still never bought one.

selfish very own opinion.

 

This is the biggest load of bullshit that's been posted around here lately.

Oh, all knowing Qroach, why don't you share the names of these titles in 2003 or 2004 that won't be supporting the GC. Please open your big secret marketing database and tell us the names of these major gaming companies that have decided that they should only develop for the PS2, XBox or PC. Or does your database include the makers of games the likes of Kabuki Warriors, Bruce Lee, Blinx, etc.

The truth of the matter is that the GC has reasonably strong 3rd party support. 3rd party product (Spiderman, TimeSplitter 2, Sega's non-sports titles) will continue to sell on the GC cause there is money to be made. Its clear that the Japanese 3rd parties are supporting the GC more and more and fleeing the XBox platform as fast as they can.

 

Simmer y'all...

 

after pissing contests, here are the pissing off contests!!

 

check out Jaleco entertainment page, hehe, from the list of upcoming titles that COME THROUGH QUINCEY, which are we gonna miss, the Bubble Bobble ripoff? Trailor Park Tycoon(suitable for the target audience), the sequel to Nightcaster? any game that comes though Q's publishing company I personally can live without, its a joke. Not a single original thought in the entire bunch.