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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."
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.
The ______ Agenda