Sales currently "sluggish", says SEGA
Wants to "adapt" to social, smartphone.
Business isn't booming for SEGA on consoles, and that's because of "sluggish" personal consumption in Europe and the US, and "stagnant" personal consumption in Japan.
SEGA cited a need to "adapt" to an audience whose "expanding" demand was for social network and smartphone games.
A six month money report covering activity from April to September recorded a total of 6.6 million global sales of SEGA games. Over three million of those were attributed to "Catalogue" and a further million to PSP. The continued popularity of Yakuza helped PS3 be the most popular console to buy SEGA games on (on which 620,000 games were bought).
But while "Home Video Game Sales" improved to $231 million, it was "Network/Other" games that triumphed, making $248 million.
Home videogames picked out as strong performers were PSP rhythm game Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA 2nd (340,000 sales), PSP Yakuza spin-off Kurohyo: Ryu ga Gotoku Shinsyo - translates to "Black Leopard: Like a Dragon New Chapter" - (250,000 sales) and another PSP rhythm game K-On! Ho-Kago Live!! (210,000 sales). The latter's based on Japanese manga K-On.
Overall, SEGA's games department was $16.1 million overdrawn. Mind you, that number was considerably bigger this time last year: -$482 million.
These numbers also don't include SEGA's fantastic new games Vanquish and Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode 1. Plus, Football Manager 2011 arrives here next week, and Sonic Colours the week after.
SEGA as a whole made $2.7 billion from April to the end of September. That breaks down into Pachinkoslot and Pachinko Machines ($1.7 billion), Consumer Business ($479 million), Amusement Center Operations ($278 million), Amusement Machine Sales ($243 million) and Other ($18.6 million). Of that $2.7 billion, SEGA turned a $301.9 million profit.