Sega's Long Demise Has Almost Reached its Inevitable Conclusion

Has any company ever died a longer, more painful-to-watch death than Sega? It seems like the company’s been one long slow-motion car crash since around 1996.

Well, Sega has suffered its latest major setback — last week they revealed that their profits for this past fiscal year were going to be much lower than expected, and worse, they’re predicting a major loss of around 55 million next year.

As a result, Sega’s cancelling a number of titles and restructuring the company in a big way. So far “restructuring” seems to mean almost entirely shutting down Sega of America, and getting out of the business of developing or publishing any title that’s not part of the still-profitable Sonic, Aliens, Football Manager or Total War franchises.

Basically, this is the beginning of the end of Sega as a real video game company. Within five years at the most I predict they’ll either get completely absorbed into parent company Sammy (like what recently happened with Hudson and parent company Konami) or they’ll just become a shell — nothing more than a collection of intellectual property.

Sigh. Time to go play Ristar and remember the good times.

via Edge & IGN