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Sega's Grand Plans, Development Changes 27

Posted by simoniker from the famous-dev-teams-disappearing dept.
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."
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Sega's Grand Plans, Development Changes More

Sega's Grand Plans, Development Changes

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  • And yet no good... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Creepy Crawler ( 680178 ) on Thursday July 24, 2003 @12:11AM (#6518485)
    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... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by cgenman ( 325138 ) on Thursday July 24, 2003 @12:48AM (#6518614) Homepage
      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.

      • 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... (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Hadlock ( 143607 )
          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

        • Re:And yet no good... (Score:3, Informative)

          by cgenman ( 325138 )
          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 a
          • 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).
      • 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).
      • 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.
    • Oh, man! I just used up my mod points not half an hour ago. See here [slashdot.org] 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

    • Re:And yet no good... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by grahamwest ( 30174 ) on Thursday July 24, 2003 @12:55AM (#6518640) Homepage
      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.

  • AM-2 (Score:1, Interesting)

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

  • "Casual Gamers"? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by neostorm ( 462848 ) on Thursday July 24, 2003 @02:56AM (#6519067)
    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"? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by chill182 ( 591443 )
      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 a
    • 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.

  • Sonic Space Channel Fighter (Score:3, Funny)

    by rf0 ( 159958 ) <rghf@fsck.me.uk> on Thursday July 24, 2003 @03:01AM (#6519085) Homepage
    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
  • 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

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