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Sega To Form Joint Company With Nintendo?
JayBonci writes: "Sega has had a lot of competition lately, and while the Dreamcast is very cool, it has had some hard times lately. IGN brings up this piece of news from out of the blue that Sega is mysteriously teaming up with Nintendo. Why would such long time rivals team up all of a sudden? The IGN article does not give much in the way of details, except to mention that Sega is going to fall short of its earnings. How would this change the gaming industry with two major players working together?"
This is more about Sega's admitting that it is much better at creating gaming software than it is at developing and properly support hardware... Expect to see more Sega games on future Nintendo systems, and perhaps on X-Box too.
I've heard numerous things about this, from Sega going out of buisness (most likely an exageration from Sega's loss) to Sega becoming an "Internet company" (actually true, the head of Sega of Japan is an idiot). What's most likely to happen? Sega will become a third party developer.
The actual Sega compay is losing money from the Dreamcast, but with every software division being split into a seperate company, it's much easier to see if Sega is actually worthwhile as a hardware company.
I personally think that if Sega can survive the Dreamcast, they will be worthwhile again as a hardware company; Sega's name will be cleared of the SegaCD/32x/Saturn era. However, if they can't survive, Smile Bit, Sonic Team, Hit Maker, and all the other renamed and now independant AM divisions will keep on making "Sega" titles as third party developers.
Oh, and on a side note, I think X-Box is most likely to succeed next in the US.
I am a bad speler. Please ignore speling meestakes in me poast.
Interesting comments.
- ramp of Convergence Past, Present and Future. Instead, as you insightfully point out, they may only succeed in losing a hell of a lot of money selling cheap DVD players to people with little intention of playing games. Sony is obviously betting that those people will justify the high purchase price to themselves as cheap-for-a-DVD-player, and then start buying games on the justification of well-I-already-own-the-console. Of course, in order for that to work, the games have to be fun, which they currently aren't. The question is how quickly they'll become so.
You may find the DC has better graphics for most titles and Dead or Alive 2, which is on both platforms, looks much better on the DC.
It's not as direct a comparison, but Quake 3 on the DC looks better and runs smoother than Unreal Tournament for the PS2. And while this was true for Q3 and UT on the PC, it's fair to say that the DC Q3 comes closer to the original than UT on the PS2 does, an impressive statement considering Q3 only really pulled ahead on high-end PC's. The PS2 is clearly the more powerful machine as a simple sum-of-its-parts, but half the VRAM and much less ease-of-programming are apparently hurting it quite a bit.
Sony has a terrible software ratio(1:1.8) which makes the $188 hit on each PS2 more difficult.And as you know, the $$$ come from software sales.
Why is Sony losing on the PS2? Easy, the PS2 happens to be one of the cheap(est) DVD player on the market.
Sony has apparently forgotten all the lessons they so ably taught Nintendo and Sega with the launch of the PS1. With the PS2, Sony has copied Nintendo's restrictive licensing, the Saturn's difficulty-of-programming, and both Nintendo and Sega's head-in-the-sand arrogance. Hell, they've even copied 3DO and the Phillips CDi with their hairbrained scheme to turn the PS2--which doesn't even ship with a modem--into the mythical set-top-entertainment-center-information-super-on
This is going to be a damn interesting round of the video-game wars, perhaps the most interesting yet. Objectively, Sega ought to be in a fine position--decent DC sales, great price, PS2 shortages, online gaming outta the box, and a crop of games which matches the PS2 graphically and bests it in gameplay. But they're losing money, and most importantly, they've lost hype. Hardcore gamers love the DC--but they've already got one. For everyone else, the only thing that's gonna get them to buy a DC is that--as you suggest--they go to the store looking for a PS2 and find out there are none. I'm not so sure that this is the sort of thing you want to build a market strategy on.
And then there's the XBox. So far, MS is playing the role of Sony in the last round--listen to developers, make the machine easy to program, snap up as many big-name titles as you can. Of course the big difference is in timing--the PS1 came out second, but only because Sega rushed the Saturn launch, with disasterous results. The XBox is coming late, which is held out by some as the fatal mistake of the N64. But with the lateness should be a corresponding technical superiority, something N64 didn't have. Plus it'll have a ton of top-tier 3rd party games, another fatal weakness of the N64.
It used to be everyone ridiculed the XBox as misguided, bloated, underpowered vaporware. Nowadays the only place you run into those opinions is slashdot, and less and less even here. Time and Newsweek are still sold on the PS2 hype, but developers appear to have moved on, and regularly gush about the XBox. I'm sure we all hope the latter group is more important in the long run.
And then, of course, there's the GameCube. Well, it's nice, and it comes in cute colors. To me it just screams XBox-lite--more powerful and easier than the PS2, but not as powerful or easy as XBox. eDRAM is some pretty hot technology, but still expensive and difficult to fab. Frankly, I don't trust it in the hands of ArtX any more than I would the Bitboys (Oy!). And I just don't think the rest of the system is going to be up to snuff, especially by the time it launches.
What Nintendo has going for it is some hot properties--Mario, Zelda, Metroid, DK, Pokemon. But while some great games have been made out of these, they're in a shrinking niche of the gaming industry, as the power of technology is allowing video games to become much more complex and appeal to an audience far beyond 9-14 year old boys. Meanwhile, MS seems to have miraculously gotten a share of or stolen outright all the great games which were once reasons to look forward to a PS2--Halo, MGS2, Oddworld, Crash, etc. I've heard EA is about to be signed, if they're not already. About all Sony has left is Square, and we'll see for how long.
So if I had to guess, I'd go with the XBox as the victor, the DC as becoming a small but solid success for a Sega desperately in need of that, the NGC as being the same for a Nintendo with rather greater aspirations for it, and the PS2 as garnering significant marketshare but without earning Sony either the profits or the influence it has apparently decided are inevitable.
But we'll have to see.
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All generalizations are false.
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I like to watch.
This is simply not true. Nothing official of this sort was confirmed, though there were rumors that the Sonic team may develop for the Gamecube (some truth to that I'm sure).