I’ll admit.. at one point in my life, during the Saturn and Dreamcast days, I was an uber Sega fanboy. I owned close to 80 different Dreamcast games before the PlayStation 2 came along and wiped it out. Make no mistake though, fanboy or not, there’s a reason why Sega no longer makes manufactures consoles. They’ve made some very, very unwise decisions in their past. The Sega Saturn’s sudden release, anyone? Although Sega turned a nice profit during their first quarter this year, the PlayStation 3 (or any console for that matter) might not be a major factor in their future as they shift to a new identity for the once proud and mighty company.
Due to sluggish sales of Iron Man 2 (around 1.3 million copies, worldwide, across ALL systems) and Alpha Protocol (700,000 copies, worldwide, across PS3, 360, and PC), Sega is shifting their attention to social and mobile games.Yippie!
Sega’s ‘consumer business’ managed to pull in over $202 million dollars, which is a 15% increase from the same quarter year-over-year and managed to reduced their operating loss to just $6.1 million. Not too shabby I’d say, considering the commercial failure of AP and the lackluster sales of Iron Man 2 across so many different platforms. Sega did manage to sell over 3.3 million units of software during the first quarter. 1.68 million in the USA, 1.33 in Europe, and 270,000 in those ‘other’ countries of the world.
Sega was quoted in a statement talk about the ever evolving gaming market and how they’re plan on moving forward with their future.
“The group needs to adapt to changing business environment in which the market demand for new content geared to social networking service (SNS) and smartphone is expanding.”
So get ready for Sonic The Hedgehog FACEBOOK edition along with paying for overpriced editions of past Sonic games on your iPhone or Android! Stay tuned to PlayStation LifeStyle for all the Sega news you can shake a stick at!
