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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."
On the unfortunate side, on the PS2 Sega is apparently mimicking EA's policy of not allowing online play of older games once new versions come out. I suspect that Sega figures they can't compete yearly with EA if they don't follow the same upgrade/online policy. AFAIK, Xbox Live policy prevents companies from doing this to customers (one of the big sticking points with getting EA on board with XBL).
Considering that Sega has been on the rocks financially since a year or so before the Dreamcast ceased production, isn't it likely that Sega is just moving the older servers over to the new games because they can't afford to maintain a larger and larger number of servers every year? They can't risk running out of servers (or coming anywhere near that) because it would immediately crush their franchises, so if they wanted to have full support for older versions of all of their software, then they would have to add more and more servers every year as a precaution, which would directly cut into their already lackluster profits. Sega has tried to be really nice about this and kept the Dreamcast SegaNet servers up for long after both the system and its games were no longer being produced, so I don't think you can really lump them in with EA, who is turning a profit and has some of the largest resources in the gaming industry outside of Microsoft or Sony, but is still screwing you over.