Sega's Grand Plans, Development Changes

Thanks to Gamesindustry.biz for their report detailing Sega's first press conference under their new boss, Hisao Oguchi. As well as announcing "a target of doubling the company's global market share in the next five years", Sega announced better-than-expected Japanese software sales, including a good performance for racing title Initial D, and also detailed major changes in the company's development structure, as explained via a GamePro article - highlights include: "Sonic Team and United Game Artists (makers of Space Channel 5 and Rez) will merge and form a company whose aim is games for casual users. Sega-AM2 will stay as is... [and] Virtua Fighter designer Yu Suzuki will form a new development team."

Comments

And yet no good...

[Creepy Crawler]

Games for the USA.

I really miss the years of Nintendo (85-93) where innovation hit games. People wernt afraid of developing a few "different" games. Yeah, many stunk, but those few were wonderful.

Now, it's "Lets Publish" v.X+1 of anything that sold in last quarter.

Kinda sad, but many linux games are more fun than Dancing Game 3000SuperX or DrivingGamePowerGo or 3DFPSShootSpree. Most of linux games are mindless (chess, go, shogi exempt) but at least keeps me interested more than 20 minutes.

Re:And yet no good...

[cgenman]

Companies in the gaming industry are starting to catch on to the law of diminishing sequals. The law states that the first game will blow all sales records and the second game will also have strong sales. The third game will show good sales, the fourth: a generous OK. The fifth game will be lucky to break even. The longer between sequals, the better the sales. The better the quality, the better the sales.

Mathematically speaking, this law can be paraphrased as

This sequal sales = last sequal sales * ( current quality / previous quality ) * Years between release / 2

The problem is that when figuring out if another sequel is warranted, developers usually take the 1st release sales figures into account, not the last, and try to minimize the time between releases to get the gaming goodies as quickly as possible. Bad news: Mega Man X8 sold poorly. Do the math.

What the industry needs is more seeds. More Ape Escape 1's and more Deceptions. More titles that sell millions because they are new, not because they are sequels. Sadly, though, this is difficult when all magazines cover is buzz, and buzz is hard to generate for a game that nobody has ever heard of let alone played.

Now I'm off to chat on the Worms 3D forums.

Re:And yet no good...

[fatboyslack]

Oh, man! I just used up my mod points not half an hour ago. See here for my previous ramble on the issue of people pining for the old days.

I do agree that many publishers are scared sh*tless of publishing something new, but I also think that the game buying public are also to blame for buying the mass volumes of gunk that are on offer. Also, not all sequels are just rehashes to cash in. GTA3:Vice City is one that was pretty innovative. Half-Life 2/Doom 3 (how often do those two get lumped together?) are a little evolutionary, but have some new tricky stuff, Rise of Nations is evolutionary of Civilisation, but is now an innovative RTS. I mean...

heck I've just reread your post. Oh, Games for the USA. Yeah, I think I've got that covered.
(Sorry if I sound 'snippy', I spent the morning dealing with idiots masquerading as intelligent important people in charge of expensive projects)

Re:And yet no good...

[grahamwest]

There are lots of interesting, different games published. People don't buy them. On my shelf I have about 60 PS2 games and I'd say over half of them are more than just "v.X+1". According to the last USA sales figures I saw, 11 of them had sold less than 50,000 copies at retail and another 9 had sold less than 100,000 copies. While some of them are flawed I'd say any of them is at least decent and 3 of them - Rez, Ico and Fatal Frame - are truly excellent.

It costs around $4 million to make a modern videogame and therefore the game needs to sell well to recoup that cost. It's hard to convince upper management to bet that much money when the odds look to be very much against financial success.

Re:And yet no good...

[xenocide2]

You know, thats not really a "law." GTA did allright in its day, and GTA2 did do noticably worse. However, GTA3 as I'm sure you know did far better, and Vice City is well on its way to outpacing that.

Re:And yet no good...

[Hadlock]

Then again GTA3 really broke new ground in the series. GTA 1 & 2 were essentially top-down, essentially 2-D shooters that you could drive around in cars. I played GTA2, and it was great, tons of fun. My friend showed me GTA3, and my jaw litterally dropped when I watched him picking off grannies from two blocks away with a sniper rifle, and taking on the SWAT team from a 3D over the shoulder view.

As to Vice City, You might have a point there, since all it is is GTA3 with a little bit of spit 'n polish & a Miami 80's story line, a page taken straight out of the Tomb Raider series.

Re:And yet no good...

[cgenman]

On the one hand, GTA 3 was a reinvisioning of the series, not a sequal so much as a remake. On the other hand, if you had actually read all of my post you would note that GTA3 was both released a full 3 years after GTA2 and had a much higher relative quality level, both of which would account for higher sales under the given equation. The "law" as stated in text was merely a statement of the recognition that one cannot milk a series forever.

Vice City is just an expansion pack. It was released 5 months after the original, and contains almost zero original code. Rockstar doesn't count it as a true sequal, and neither do I.

Re:And yet no good...

[PainKilleR-CE]

Vice City is just an expansion pack. It was released 5 months after the original, and contains almost zero original code.

While I agree that it's basically just another game on an almost-the-same engine (minor changes such as indoor areas similar to State of Emergency and motorcycles), Vice City was released almost a year after GTA 3 (Nov. 2001, Oct 2002).

Re:And yet no good...

[Anonymous Coward]

cgenman,

Your spelling is abhorrent. Go back to school. Or, if you're still in school, get off slashdot and pick up a damn book (like perhaps the dictionary).

Re:And yet no good...

[Rayonic]

Original games outpace sequels? What officially-licensed universe are you living in?

In my world, Final Fantasy 10 outsold Ico.
Mario Sunshine outsold Battlezone.
The Sims expansion #14 outsold Planescape Torment.
etc. etc.

Re:And yet no good...

[cgenman]

My mistake. I was going by PC release dates.

Re:And yet no good...

[cgenman]

Listen. I've been working 17 hour days for the last few weeks. I don't sleep much. Hopefully we will be ready to ship soon, and I can return to reading my usual diet of political rhetoric and sociological texts. In the meantime you are going to have to accept the misspelling of one bloody word.

Sequel.

According to my Compact Edition (unabridged) Oxford English Dictionary, that's the only word misspelled in my two previous posts. Reinvisioning isn't a word proper, but as invision refers to a lack of sight it can be considered a witty jab at the lack of social consciousness of the game referenced.

Thank you for pointing out my mistake in such a helpful and mature fashion. I could point out that it is impossible to "get off slashdot," but such a thing would be like burning a letter because the messenger was ugly. Besides, someday you too will discover prepositions. In the meantime I can't thank you enough for your helpful commentary. I wonder why it wasn't modded "Score 5: Insightful"?

Re:And yet no good...

[Doc316]

I totally agree back in the day of Nintendo so many ions ago no one was afraid of different games and alot of them were great. and I would prefer to play a boring linux game which will challege me more than most games that are out today. ps a message for Sega do you thing I'm still with you. "i still own a saturn"

AM-2

[Anonymous Coward]

So is Yu passing AM2 over to someone else? I thought that already was his dream production team.

Re:AM-2

[shione]

yes, someone else will be heading Shenmue 3 but Yu will oversee it.

"Casual Gamers"?

[neostorm]

I'm really concerned about the combination of Sonic Team and UGA making games for "Casual Gamers". Generally the titles produced by these teams is anything but. That's depressing to think of considering only a year or so ago UGA was being hailed as one of the most innovative development teams for creating Rez. When I think "Casual Gamers" innovation and creativity usually does not come to mind.

Re:"Casual Gamers"?

[chill182]

I'm really concerned about the combination of Sonic Team and UGA making games for "Casual Gamers". Generally the titles produced by these teams is anything but.

Rez and Space Channel 5 are ideal for casual gamers. Both only use the control pad and 2 buttons. They have the simplicity of an NES game.

When I think "Casual Gamers" innovation and creativity usually does not come to mind.

If I look at the most popular games played by my non-gamer friends there is Tony Hawk, GTA3, Super Smash Bros Melee and The Sims. I think these are all innovative and creative games. I hope more games are marketed towards casual gamers so that video gaming can become more mainstream and shake its stigma of being "adolescent boys who don't go outside."

Re:"Casual Gamers"?

[Anonymous Coward]

What planet are you from? Are you new to gaming?

All of UGA's games are simple, pick-up-and-play games. Sonic Team is responsible for more for the same (Sonic games, Chuuchuu Rocket, Nights into Dreams, etc.). And here's a hint: simple games are appealing to casual gamers.

And I think it's only your ignorant elitism that doesn't allow you to see how the terms "casual gamer" and "innovation" can not go hand-in-hand. Complexity, the bane of casual gaming, is something that I would more likely associate with poor design than "innovation."

Re:"Casual Gamers"?

[Moraelin]

I like to think of myself as a "casual gamer". (Albeit one which "casually" spends some 40 hours a week gaming;)

A lot of what "casual gaming" is all about is what the rest of CS calls "usability". Having a clean, easy to learn interface. Flight sims which need one to remember 25 key shortcuts are not for casual gamers.

The rest includes stuff like a balanced difficulty curve.

When you think of "casual gamers" you probably think of people who play yet another incarnation of Tetris. That's not true as such. Although Tetris is an example of a casual-gamer-friendly game, it's not the only game (or kind of game) in that category.

The Sims was already mentioned, so lemme give you another example: Diablo. It had a clean intuitive interface, a well balanced skill system, a decent difficulty curve (not a total cakewalk, but very much possible to get past any stage without mad skillz or cheating), and for a PC game it was remarkably bug-free. It was pretty much the ideal game for casual gamers, and it sold like crazy because of that.

Let me give you another example of the kind of interface design decisions which make a game more casual-gamer-friendly. Fallout versus Arcanum. Neither was completely for casual gamers, but Fallout got a few things better in that direction. Take aimed shots for example. Fallout had a neat little dialog for that, where you selected where to shoot, while Arcanum needed you to RTFM and know that ctrl+click is a head shot. Fallout had a big clearly labelled "end turn" button, Arcanum had an unlabelled oval that many people didn't even know it was a button. Etc.

Console games also tend to be a good bet for a casual gamer. Not all of them, mind you, but generally it's a bit safer a bet than PC games.

Sonic Space Channel Fighter

[rf0]

If they are doing this why don't they merge all of the teams and give us Sonic Space Channel Fighter. Now thats a game I would like to see

Rus

Re:Sonic Space Channel Fighter

[Anonymous Coward]

What I want is Space Chanel 5 w/ Rez Vibrator. Ohhh... baby. You can left, left, right, right, shoot, shoot, shoot me anytime Ulala...

Re:Sonic Space Channel Fighter

[Anonymous Coward]

Suit yerself, personally I'm waiting for Super Sonic Virtua Monkey Space Channel Fighter DX: Director's Cut 2K4.

What?

[Inoshiro]

MegaMan 8 on the PSX is a Greatest Hits title, as is MegaMan X4. The crappy MegaMan games (IE: X6) sold less, because people wanted to play them less. The good ones (X4, 8) became greatest hits because they sold a lot of copies.

I'm assuming you mean MegaMan 8, anyways, since X8 doesn't exist (X7 is going to be released in the fall).

A NiGHTS Sequel, please!

[Saige]

I know someone was just ranting above about all the games being sequels, but I don't think that's inherently bad. It's so many are sequels to mediocre or formulaic games. (not counting Sims add-on packs, as they weren't really sequels, but were still overdone)

NiGHTS into Dreams for the Saturn was a very creative and original game, and about the only reason I don't still play it is that I never got the analog controller for it, and the Saturn pad hurts after a bit.

A sequel to this game I'm certain would be a hit on the GameCube - it fits in to the type of stuff we see on that platform, and with the power of the Cube, it would not only likely look gorgeous, but allow them to add more to the game, perhaps allow the a-life thing going on in the background to have a bigger impact on the game.

Please, please, please Sega...

Re:A NiGHTS Sequel, please!

[Anonymous Coward]

I got the NiGHTS controller for a few bucks on eBay. It really is easier to control, even though it's just a d-pad mapped to a movable stick.