No More Sega Sports on Gamecube?

http://www.gamersmark.com/news/2002/11/0/1973/

"No More Sega Sports On GameCube???
Posted: 2002-11-20 By Osei Tyson

The Dow Jones News is reporting that Sega may discontinue developing Sega Sports titles for Nintendo's next-generation console beginning next year. The company, burned by extremely disappointing sales of its sports games on GameCube, and hit with lower than expected results across all platforms, is currently deciding whether or not to drop support of the low-selling titles on Nintendo's platform.

Sega Sports' NBA 2K3 sold 98,000 units for PS2 and 53,000 units for Xbox in October. Meanwhile, the title garnered sales of only 7,000 units for GCN during the same period, according to various tracking service data. Sega's NFL 2K3 has sold 15,000 copies since its release versus sales of 69,000 of EA's competing Madden NFL 2003, which released at the same time."

I ran across it while doing a search for something. I tried to verify it with another story or two, like from Dow Jones' news page, but didn't find anything anywhere...

--Scourge .

Hrm.. interesting.. Looking at those numbers you can't blame them if they did drop GCN though.

Sports games were selling horribly on Cube so they decided to save some money by only making an XBox and PS2 version. It's on videogames.com. Not to worry though, just because there won't be any more Sega Sports on GC doesn't mean there won't be any more Sega games.

Unfortunately, the GameCube is the worst console for sports. It lacks the hard drive of the Xbox, and most of the gameplay layouts were designed with the PS2 pad in mind.

If Sega wants to compete against EA they have to make something that is unmistakeably better than EA Sports. While most people here consider that to already be the case, many, MANY people do not (hell, I don't even). This is a brash spur of the moment idea here and corrrect me if I am neglecting something, okay? It is not forseeable for Sega to be able to make a football (or any other sport) game that overshadows EA's efforts in everyway when releasing in the same time frame and across multiple systems.

However, if Visual Concepts were able to zero in on one platform and create a hands down better game on a more powerfull system I think they would very well beable to cover thier sales expectations and at the very least cut back overhead. Looking at the numbers the margin between SS games sold on PS2 vs. Xbox is not porportional to how many people own PS2 to Xbox. If they developed the games completely around that hardware, they would havbe the clearly superior game and a good chance to sell a million copies of a sports title each year. Perhaps Sega would sell close to a million for several titles thought that's a big question mark. Given the current atmospehere - I don't see them going too wrong. At the very least the over-head would be signifigantly less and the sales potential somewhat greater.

Am I incorrect? Why? For the record, I think it's a good decision to drop Gamecube. It's not being sold to sports gamers, it's being sold to people who know good and well what Nintendo is about and that's Nintendo's games, and perhaps RE fans.

ºTracer

One interesting thing though - you guys look at the Madden numbers for Gamecube? Those suck too - Madden's doing Sega-like numbers on the GC.

Odd, sorta - sports games just aren't selling well on the system.

Exactly, Sega isn't selling enough everywhere else, the overhead for developing on Cube is more than the profits made by 7K games.

It's simple. Sports games do well because of the mainstream market which don't own GCs.

Quote:

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Originally posted by Mr_Furious
It's simple. Sports games do well because of the mainstream market which don't own GCs.

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I agree with you but I think it goes a little farther than that. Mainstream gamers who do happen to own the GC (yes, they do exist) most likely also own either a PS2 or Xbox. With this likelihood in mind, why on Earth would anyone who has an alternative console to play sports games on even consider getting the GC version? Like Yoshi astutely pointed out, the GC is the worst suited console of the three for sport games. The control layouts are best suited for the PS2, and the Xbox rev typically has the best aesthetics of the three in addition to the harddrive. There's absolutely no reason to buy the GC version unless it's the only console you own. And those whose sole console is a GC are most likely enthusiasts - not exactly the target demographic for sports games.

Sega's seemingly smartening up business wise. If it don't make dollars, it don't make sense.

Yeah, so once again a Nintendo console has the list of genre's being supported on it become increasingly limited. RPG and sports fans? You've always got your 'main system' for those games.