Sega Profits Surge On Arcade Titles, Despite EA Sports Domination

Thanks to Reuters for their story revealing Sega's profits jumped 485 percent for the first half of the fiscal year, to 5.93 billion yen ($54.53 million), largely due "to strong sales of its [Japanese] arcade game machines such as [popular crane game] 'UFO Catcher 7' and [intriguing arcade-based CCG] 'The Key of Avalon'." Elsewhere, Sega's consumer division "...posted an operating loss of 1.8 billion yen, but it was less than it expected because of solid sales of its soccer simulation and car racing games." However, the company "...trimmed its projection of key U.S. sports games to 1.73 million from 2.6 million units", still dogged by Electronic Arts' domination of the genre, as the president said: "We need to carefully plan how to compete with EA in terms of marketing, but we believe our games can win more market share because of their high quality."

Comments

Sega's basketball is easily the best

[ianscot]

Since before the demise of the Dreamcast, NBA2k[-2-3] has been well better than the EA NABLive series.

EA's play testers must not even watch real ball. This year's new version, judging by the reviews, lets you make either layups or three, but there's next to no middle jumper game at all. Serious play balance problems.

The Sega series also has had better "franchise" modes, though those break down in any game after a couple of seasons, either way.