How much do you think the whole division is worth without the licenses? We’re not just talking about talented individual studios, we’re talking a whole established organization with AAA pedigree, structure, development pipelines already in place, with a powerful publishing and marketing arm. This alone skips so much time and investments they’d make if they kept adding individual studios to XGS.
And if some of the studios seem to not release a lot of stuff then you almost know that’s nothing to do with them directly and more with the publisher or DC/WB at large, we hear Rocksteady pitched some projects and were rejected or cancelled.
You can hire talent and whats decides the value in these studios most of the time is the IP’s they own. Just look at what Insomniac cost with all of this you mentioned above … pennies.
Insomniac is an individual studio and everyone thinks they’re undervalued for what Sony bought them for. If we assume a AAA proven and rated studio is worth around $400m now how much would the whole division be worth in your opinion? Especially consider that the studios aren’t struggling and desperate to sell.
I know people have been discussing a Sega acquisition for a long time, and while I understand that it would probably be a great thing for Microsoft’s overall portfolio and their international success, I have to say the prospect of a Sega acquisition doesn’t make me particularly excited at all. I’d much rather see them go after IO Interactive or Remedy.
But, thinking about Sega I tried to come up with a) Sega games I really like, and b) just any Sega games at all. For the first list, I pretty much came up empty. Sonic and Shenmue, the two biggest Sega properties I can think of, aren’t my cup of tea. I do remember enjoying JSRF reasonably well, but it was far from a favourite. Ditto Panzer Dragoon Orta.
And beyond those four properties, I couldn’t come up with any other Sega titles at all. Granted, I was an NES kid growing up, my first real exposure to Sega titles came with the original Xbox, as you may have guessed from what I listed above.
So I had a look at the Wikipedia list of Sega franchises and while there were plenty of familiar titles (Afterburner, Crazy Taxi, OutRun, Super Monkey Ball, to name a few) there was nothing at all that made my heart swell. Maybe Otogi… a modern version of that could be something special.
But yeah, as far as I’m concerned I’d much rather see them go after IO Interactive or Remedy.
You are greatly underestimating Sega’s IP. At absolute worst case it’s comparable to Capcom and Konami.
Sega effectively kept their platforms alive with the first party because they weren’t getting support from Capcom, Konami, or Square. They have equivalents to many of the biggest IP from most of those publisher, though obviously not always as popular.
They also (alongside Namco) owned the arcade scene across multiple genres.
Oh, I didn’t mean to imply their IP isn’t valuable or appealing to many people. That’s why I started off by saying “I understand that it would probably be a great thing for Microsoft’s overall portfolio and their international success.”
I was only saying that it’s not appealing to me and that as far as my personal tastes are concerned, I’d rather see them acquire other companies.
Yeah I understand. I guess I am just assuming that since you have very little experience with Sega you don’t really get much from just looking at a list of names of games.
The biggest problem with Sega is they aren’t even capable of making games like those any longer.
All those IP’s you mentioned are from the Sega Japan branch. You should do some research into the Sega West Branch. And I mean the Talent not the games they have made. Obviously they are known for the RTS games and more so the PC space. However, that branch is what was really keeping Sega alive all these years. They have incredible leadership that is always being voted best place to work in the games industry. The problem is that they do not chances to flex their creative potential because Sega needs to keep the money flowing with the safe bets from the hot selling Total War, Company of Heroes, Football Manager Etc Etc. Remember, Creative Assembly did make Alien Isolation, and Relic did do a third person action shooter Space Marines. So they have shown to be able to adapt and do other projects. And as of this moment Creative Asselmbly has a total of 800 employees with 5 studio locations working on multiple projects that are not RTS games. So i would say just wait and see what happens over the next 2 years. But that doesn’t mean that i would not want Remedy or IO, i mean fuck it get them all lol.
