How Sega can become relevant again

As much as Sega wants us to love them, and although they plan on making a big announcement at Tokyo Games Show, they’re still not doing too well with their sales at the moment.

According to an article on Forbes, Sega have reported a huge plummet in their sales figures, with a decrease of 42% in total sales.

Things are looking even more dire with their recent financial earnings report, which lists a drop of 52.9 billion yen ($426 million), making matters worse for the once great console giant and publisher.

We’ve stated before that Sega needs to make some changes, even going as far as to list franchises which they could bring back from the dead. We don’t need more Sonic games, or Sonic: Boom type games for that matter.

So let us discuss what Sega should actually be doing, and currently isn’t. We truly want Sega to have some relevance in gaming.

Use your talent

So Sega has Atlus under their reigns, but they’re not really making use of them for Sega-related projects.

Rather, they’re just acting as merely a publisher, which is great and Atlus are a good asset to have, particularly when it comes to their Persona games which do very well in Western markets.

But there needs to be an injection of talent from Atlus into current Sega games in development, that doesn’t seem to be happening at all.

Atlus produce and develop fantastic games, and with their upcoming game Persona 5, it would be awesome for Sega to use Atlus’s skills with an old Sega franchise that hasn’t been fully utilised in recent years. Just think of the possibilities here.

Make use of your franchises

We will say this again, Sega really needs to make use of their older franchises.

The fact that Shenmue 3 did so well on Kickstarter is indicative of the lure of Sega franchises that still remains in the public consciousness.

We don’t need more Sonic games and franchises like Streets of Rage, Gunstar Heroes, Altered Beast and Jet Set Radio could all do with new game. This needs to happen.

Expand your markets

When it comes to releasing games in western territories, Sega is a terrible publisher indeed. What happened to all of the Yakuza games, western fans would give an arm and a leg for their releases here, and Yakuza 5 took so long to come to the west.

Rather, many import Sega published games because they are typically only released within Japan. Sega needs to adjust this focus and release games in the west.

They are missing out on a bigger market share, and with their current financial standing what they’re doing doesn’t make much business sense.

Of course, we’re not saying to release every game under the sun. But if fans are hammering on about a particular series, Sega needs to take note of this like Nintendo does.

With these steps in mind, Sega could slowly but surely become relevant again. They won’t be releasing any new hardware anytime soon as hardcore Sega fans would hope, but they could become a good third party publisher.

Just stop with the Sonic games for the moment, Sega is more than just Sonic and we would love for them to prove this to the world once gain. We can hope; can’t we.