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That's seriously awesome and a very pleasant surprise. I personally thought that Sonic X-Treme would never see the light of day.
Looking forward to next updates.
Also, it would be great to not poison this thread with these ridiculous "modern-Sonic-sux-Stupid-failed-Sega" discussions.
That kind of comes with the territoryQuote:
Originally Posted by Bottino
I'm glad Dione Warwick left the Sonic Friends Network.
Well it's kind of true. The last partially decent Sonic game was Sonic Generations. Within a span of over ten years, that's pretty much been the best thing Autism Team could come up with. Before that, we had a couple decent titles like Sonic Advance, Sonic Adventure (Still full of glitches, but makes the list due to being the best 3D Sonic game not made by fans), and Sonic Pocket Adventure (Mostly because it copied the classics). Practically everything after that was about as appealing as pouring bleach down my dick hole and watching it burn a bigger hole. What was after that? Heroes? Shadow? Riders? Secret Rings? Black Knight? Rush? 06? Rivals? Unleashed? Sonic 4? Just pure shit left and right. Sonic Mega Collection Plus and Sonic Gems Collection were the best Sonic games released after like, Advance 1. A re-release of Sonic the Fighters in some collection game is more worth my money than any of the shit listed above.Quote:
Originally Posted by Bottino
Bah, Secret Rings is the best Sonic game since Sonic Adventure 2!
The Storybook games were retarded. Just boring fan fiction made into broken games on the Wii that no one bought unless they had asperger's syndrome.
The Sonic fanboy routine:
Code:void SonicFanboy (string thread_title)
{
if (thread_title.contains("sonic"))
{
while(true)
{
DoDrama();
}
}
}
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQhjJ0BLxT0
"STOP HATING ON SONIC, YA FRICKEN FANBOYS! THE SONIC CYCLE IS OVERRRRRRRRR!!! SONIC 4, SONIC COLORS, AND SONIC GENERATIONS WERE GOOD GAMES!!!"
I tend to disagree. I'd argue that it cost them more money to discontinue the console than to just slowly start releasing third party games for Nintendo/Sony/MS on the side.Quote:
Originally Posted by TrekkiesUnite118
Besides, Kogen actually is correct about Sega of America being the driving force behind the discontinuation:
http://www.sega-16.com/forum/showthr...l=1#post623309
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/featur...ast.php?page=7
Moore's Manifesto of the Future
In September 2000, well before the year's biggest sales months had taken place, Peter Moore and Charles Bellfield wrote a report called the "Manifesto of the Future," which they presented to all of Sega of Japanese executives and the studio heads in Japan, including creative heavyweights such as Yu Suzuki (AM2), Yuji Naka (Sonic Team), Rikiya Nakagawa (AM1/Wow Entertainment) and Toshihiro Nagoshi (AM4/Ausement Vision) among others.
"I remember it like it was yesterday," said Bellfield. "We presented a strategy in September 2000 that said we were not viable as a hardware player in the States beyond Christmas 2000 and that we needed to get out of the hardware business. That meeting was the first time Japan had ever heard that we could not be successful against the power of Microsoft, who had not yet announced their intention to come into the space, but we knew they were."
"They were hearing from the one region, the US, that had been successful with the Dreamcast launch, that the future of the Dreamcast was not going to be rosy. North America was the one lifeline that they had left -- that maybe success in the US would allow them to bridge doing another hardware platform, or to extend the life of this platform, or allow it to be reinvented in Japan and Europe."
"When we told them that staying in the hardware business was not our advice, the next thing that happened was all of the heads of all the studios got up and walked out without saying a word. That, in the Japanese culture, is pretty rude. But they were shocked."
Moore's document stated that Sega was arguably one of the greatest software companies ever, and it should focus on its major strength: software."
I think Okawa later realized he had ruined his life's work when agreeing to Moore's Manifesto which is why he donated 700 million dollars to the company shortly before he died.
To be fair, i don"t believe either gc or xbox outsold ps1 for quite some time as well. And it typically takes quite a while for a newly launched system to outsell previous gen leaders (about a year or so after the launch month). What really hurt Sega was having unsold inventory, not not outselling the previous gen leader (PS1).Quote:
Originally Posted by TrekkiesUnite118
I can't find the links right now, but IGN had a breakdown of what Sega had in unsold inventory and it amounted to about 2.5-3 million units. When DC truly hit "bargain bins" (the $49.99 price point) there were just about 500k left unsold.Quote:
People seem to forget that a lot of Dreamcast Sales came after it was discontinued and was being sold in bargain bins.
That was Sega big mistake that ruined the company.Quote:
Originally Posted by TrekkiesUnite118
DC simply wasn't selling good enough for the losses Sega was taking on hardware for them to hope to return to profitability.
The whole Dreamcast project was a move dictated by desperation and pride.
When talking about a console total sales it is always used the total shipment worldwide provided by the manufacturer because it is a precise figure as it gets.Quote:
Originally Posted by A Black Falcon
PS1 LTD: 102.49M
N64 LTD: 32.93M
Saturn LTD: 9.26M
Dreamcast LTD: 9.13M
DC total shipment as March 2001: 8.20MQuote:
Originally Posted by spiffyone
Sega DC unsold inventory "dumped" at fire sales the following fiscal year: 0.93M
The actual stocks at retail was likely indeed in the million, US total sales at retail provided by NPD as March 2001 was 2.89M.
Total DC sold in US as 2002 provided by NPD is 4.01M.
I have already said it, but the Dreamcast was discontinued bcause:Quote:
Originally Posted by retrospiel
1) Sega was running out of money.
2) The system crashed and burned in Japan and sold terribly there.
3) US sales flattened off in 2000; the system had no momentum after its solid launch in '99.
By September 2000, saying that Sega was doomed as a hardware maker was just stating the obvious. The PS2 released that holiday season! Sega gave it a try, and pushed it in the US, but they failed, and so in January they announced they were leaving. But based on only Japan, Sega might have had to give up even sooner, considering how awful Japanese DC sales were!
Also, there had been internal talk in Sega of Japan about leaving hardware too. I'm pretty sure of this. It just wasn't a majority opinion... until their finances faded, and it became clear that their only chances were probably bankruptcy eventually, or leaving the hardware business. They chose the latter.
Yeah, both of these numbers are slightly above actual sales of course, but they're all the numbers we really have, and most shipped systems did sell.Quote:
Originally Posted by Folco
[quote]Saturn LTD: 9.26M[quote]
Hmm, interesting. I wonder what the regional breakdown of that is... 1M Europe, 1.5M US, 6.75M Japan? Or was the US or EU final totals slightly higher? I imagine we don't know what the real breakdown is, but it's interesting to try to figure it out. I know we have "1M Europe, 2M US, 5M Japan" numbers from early '98, but I think that US number is a bit high, isn't it... and that doesn't add up to 9.26 million, and the only way for it to would be, like, 1.25M hardware sales in Japan in '98-'00. Which seems a bit high, going by how the system was pretty much dead after the end of '98. But who knows, maybe it did sell that much.
Hmm, so is that "10.5 million DCs sold" number wrong too? Or did it sell much in Japan after March '02? I'm not at all surprised, if that number is wrong. I just thought the DC outsold the Saturn...Quote:
Dreamcast LTD: 9.13M
DC total shipment as March 2001: 8.20M
Sega DC unsold inventory "dumped" at fire sales the following fiscal year: 0.93M
Yes, at the time the US launch was the best ever however sales afterwards were disappointing.Quote:
Originally Posted by Blades
Look at the trajectory (US figures provided by NPD):
1999: 1.48M (roughly 4 months)
2000: 1.28M
2001 and 2002: 1.25M (at fire sale prices)
EDIT:
A sale number isn't right or wrong, it's reliable or not (that is it is provided by an entity you have faith in).Quote:
Originally Posted by A Black Falcon
DC LTD I posted was obtained by summing DC LTD as March 2001 with the unsold inventory Sega declared was dumping during the next fiscal year.
Sincerely I don't see how Sega would produce more systems (I believe production was halted in January 2001 or earlier) or push more systems at retail after March 2002.
You can verify the number reading financial reports which are still available on SegaSammy site.
About Saturn regional breakdown, my rough guess is
Japan: 6M
America: 2M
Europe/Other: 1M
You missed the more important factor IMO, that is Sega was running out of money because the DC business was severely bleeding money.Quote:
Originally Posted by A Black Falcon
Sega was too much aggressive and the bet counterfired.
If memory serves me right the operating income of the arcade division was more or less stable compared to past years so the death of arcades outside Japan wasn't really a cause in Sega demise.
The death of the "arcade culture" though was a huge blow for Sega...
Yeah, you can also see this on the chart quoted earlier in the thread, the DC did well at first and then faded.Quote:
Originally Posted by Folco
That's true.Quote:
EDIT:
A sale number isn't right or wrong, it's reliable or not (that is it is provided by an entity you have faith in).
Well, Dreamcast games released in Japan until 2007, remember. It's reasonable to assume that some small-ish number of systems were sold each year from the back stock they had probably built up. Think of how Nintendo sold the Famicom until, like, 2005 or something, with small numbers of sales each year. You're right though, I would expect that most sales there would have happened between December '98 and April '02, the period that Sega was releasing first-party titles for the system in Japan. But it's likely there were some sales after that... the only question is if it actually added up to anything significant. But if that 9.26 million number is the real, final Saturn sales number, it seems possible that the DC could have gotten the 130k sales needed to match the Saturn's total, perhaps... That's a small gap.Quote:
DC LTD I posted was obtained by summing DC LTD as March 2001 with the unsold inventory Sega declared was dumping during the next fiscal year.
Sincerely I don't see how Sega would produce more systems (I believe production was halted in January 2001 or earlier) or push more systems at retail after March 2002.
When did Sega start putting hardware sales in their financial reports, anyway? Haven't they never gone back and said official by-region shipment numbers, unlike Sony and Nintendo who have both done that?Quote:
You can verify the number reading financial reports which are still available on SegaSammy site.
For US Saturn sales, I just struggle to see how sales get up to 2 million considering the reality of the chart we have: http://www.sega-16.com/forum/showthr...l=1#post693177 Those other numbers look quite reasonable, though.Quote:
About Saturn regional breakdown, my rough guess is
Japan: 6M
America: 2M
Europe/Other: 1M
I didn't miss it, I just wasn't explaining the reasons, just that they were. And anyway, they had multiple reasons for being so low on money.Quote:
You missed the more important factor IMO, that is Sega was running out of money because the DC business was severely bleeding money.
I'm pretty sure I remember reading that arcade revenues declined at some point in the DC's life, or the Saturn/DC era... you think that arcade revenues were stable? That would be surprising, if true; I thought that the arcade decline and the Dreamcast were both major causes of Sega's running out of money.Quote:
Sega was too much aggressive and the bet didn't pay off.
If memory serves me right the operating income of the arcade division was more or less stable compared to past years so the death of arcades outside Japan wasn't really a cause in Sega demise.
The death of the "arcade culture" though was a huge blow for Sega...
Regardless of that, though, remember that Sega had never had as much cash as Nintendo, or the size of a Sony or Microsoft. None of those others would be driven out with Sega-like losses; they've all lost more in some years, particularly more recently, and done fine because they are larger or have big cash reserves. Sega was relatively small and consistently poor at saving money, and it eventually did them in. Sega made so many major money-losing mistakes in the '90s, in between making a lot of great games...
Revenue decline from the FY '98 apex but didn't fall off badly.Quote:
Originally Posted by A Black Falcon
The arcade business was always profitable.
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost...&postcount=182