There’s no fucking way they would have spent so much money on three WH titles and a fuckton of DLC to make an absolutely colossal RTS game if it was niche. Total War Warhammer single handedly saved WH Fantasy with how well it sold.

Keep in mind a lot of that is from Pachinko, see articles like this: https://www.tweaktown.com/news/56271/sega-made-1-billion-pac...

ok dad

And... we've come full circle, back to the 90s.

100m

It's their model working as expected. The hand-picked team lavishly designs the main games, never rushing their design. Persona 5 released in 2016, when it was meant to only release on the PS3. Once Persona 6 is out, other work-for-hire studios can work on spin-offs to make the big money.

Metaphor is a fantastic detour until then though.

It's hard for me to picture how P6 could really be a step forward.

I played P4G long ago on my PS Vita, bought P5R on Steam a while back and I'm most of the way through it on my Steam Deck right now.

I love the story and the art for P5R but the game is a bit weak as a game, mainly in the way that other turn-based games (a genre I like) tend to be weak. Except for one battle, status effects mostly don't matter (just wait a few turns and they expire) Games with mechanics that don't matter are just so widespread: I think of Fire Emblem games where the weapon triangle doesn't matter because (i) it is so easy to overlevel characters, and (ii) if your characters is overleveled the weapon triangle doesn't matter.

P5R is a crazy long game that doesn't make you make any choices about which social attributes you develop or which characters you befriend, new game plus is unimaginable because the game is so long so you feel you have to do everything which makes the game longer. On top of it the game sets deadlines for you to clear various dungeons which are never challenging to hit.

... and it's not that it is a bad game relative to other games, it's one of the best, but playing through makes think that people need to make something really different in the area of turn-based games mashed up with visual novels such as shorter games that you have to play through to experience everything or games where every mechanic is meaningful. Back in the PS Vita era there were many games where I would really enjoy the NG+ such as Akiba's Trip 2 in which playthoughs got faster and faster as you got stronger or the Neptunia games which had first rate voice acting in two languages and NG+ meant you could enjoy both.

That makes much more sense, thank you. I just looked at the table on the linked page and not the *.pdf of the deck itself.

thank you that makes sense

That's part of what makes it hilarious and charming.

You’re right but it was called Yakuza in the west for many years. I don’t know if they made the right decision or not renaming it but it is interesting to consider if it made an impact in one way or another on sales.

Actually, I would think the artist is mad for selling those paintings so cheap. Paintings usually command a much higher price tag.

Then I’d compliment your ability to create a flowing theme throughout the house.

The problem with your analogy here is that art for the home (or anywhere outside a museum or gallery) is generally bought to compliment the overall aesthetics of the building, rather than to be enjoyed in isolation.

> Now if i had 17 unique paintings exploring a variety of motifs and styles, each one with a story to tell that would actually be worth talking about.

That’s called “eclectic”, which is basically an artsy way of saying “mismatched”. Some people dig that style. Personally I don’t.

Likening a game to a painting is just a false premise. Games are a unique medium that can in themselves hold lots of different things which inherently makes them hard to compare wholesale to other mediums. They can be similar to Chess in the sense of requiring strategy or a physical sport in that they can be almost entirely composed of the skill expression of the players. They can even hold paintings or novels in their entirety, or do something entirely unique that just can't be done in other mediums (my favorite example of that is Outer Wilds).

Why are you so judgmental of what kinds of paintings people hang on their walls? Just hang the paintings on your walls that you like and leave everybody else alone.

Growing up I never had exposure to video games, so I didn't really know about Sonic until my son saw his face on some toy and IMMEDIATELY had questions. Who is that, what's his name, what does he do, ....

I think there's something about Sonic's face that is timeless, innate, prehistoric even.

Indeed, but they will also stop selling or distributing them, meaning they will only be available via pirates/archivists (which are endlessly harassed by these companies).

Things can be challenging, easy, predictable, and trite and still be good. Garfield/Tetris/KFC is fine. There's not shame in enjoying it, and there's certainly no shame in working on it (or selling it).

Evolution and original stuff are amazing and we should want them to exist. To be disappointed because we also have stuff that isn't like that is to turn a blind eye to what makes up a lot of our life.

You’re not wrong for wanting it. But you are wrong for expecting that every studio should only ever release completely original content.

The reality is that there is room for studios to release original content AND sequels.

For every Star Wars and Marvel rehash there is a Big Hero 6, Elementals, and Zootopia.

And for every Nintendo there are a dozen indie games studios releasing creative new games.

The key to avoiding rehashes is literally just to avoid them. ;)

You’re not willing to pay for more though. You thought that the only way “good” things were funded was by “bad” things which people enjoy subsidising you.

I hear you, but that's really not where their heart is:

https://sccgmanagement.com/sccg-news/2025/5/15/sega-sammy-se...

> Sega Sammy’s new gaming division, which started in mid-2024, became a standout performer. This part of the business includes the US-focused slot machine company Sega Sammy Creation investments in online gaming, and a 45% stake in Paradise City, an integrated resort in South Korea. The division brought in ¥5.4 billion ($36.4 million) in sales and turned a profit, with an EBITDA of ¥1 billion ($6.7 million).

We all get that you are not somebody who likes sequels/remakes etc for releasing similar and/or repetitive content. But some people really do, and this whole thread and the sales numbers it is based on are kind of evident of that.

Why do you have such a problem with other people enjoying that type of content?

That is the EXACT process I automated the non-redacting parts of using cron jobs and task folders at a past job.

Flatten everything to a set of just images.

Have normal human staff draw black boxes over anything to be redacted.

Compose a new 'PDF' that's a set of 'scanned' images.

That sounds pretty foolproof so long as your black box fill method doesn't fill with a 99% opacity, or a flood fill leaves behind a few invisible anti-aliased pixels, or the merge operation of the black box doesn't result in some multiplication leaving a few bits of difference. Even if you erased the layer below, then filled above, I've had erasures vary in the bits outside the alpha channel messing up games using the texture info.

Overall, I kind of understand the paranoia even though in principle it does sound pretty foolproof.

>What if you just block out text in PDF, then Print to PDF - does that retain the text behind the black block?

Possibly depending on the application you use to print and the printer driver. Acrobat has some unexpected behaviours when printing.

I sell construction work. Sometimes my customers will have me price up something that someone else priced to them and they will send me a competitor’s redacted scope letter with the pricing blanked out so I can bid ‘apples to apples’ aka the same scope of work.

I’ve unredacted proposals using the ‘unflatten’ command in Bluebeam Revu (which is by far the best PDF editor) which allowed me to underbid my competitor and win the job (and at a higher price than I would’ve submitted).

Definitely an ethical grey area, but an edge is an edge ;)

Probably trading of some sort?

When you look at pretty much every other brand out there, Sega aren’t nearly as aggressively milking their IPs.

They’re not even in the same league as Nintendo, Disney, Lego, etc. And when you look at other games companies from the same era (Capcom, Atari, etc) then you’d see that Sega are still releasing original content too vs the same rehashed shit that people buy purely because of the name.

Then on the other end of the spectrum you have companies buying studios and letting those games rot (like EA). Studios encouraging micro-transactions (Microsoft with Minecraft, EA, Roblox, Epic, etc) and even underage gambling with loot boxes. Shit that has no place in gaming. It’s Also Sega are one of the least aggressive companies out there “defending” their IP against fan-made content.

Sega are a massively underrated brand in today’s gaming landscape.

Sadly I suspect they are. There’s an entire culture of denigrating anything fun by absurdly reducing it to its basic components. I’ve seen a lot of people denigrate football by calling it “kickball” and “just 20 men running around chasing a ball on a field.” I guess we could say our job is just hitting a keyboard thousands of times a day, no idea how anyone would enjoy that! /sarcasm

Why do you assume that the millions of people who buy the new Persona or Mario Kart game are the same ones that bought the old one? It's very likely that they're fresh 12-20 somethings that were younger or otherwise just missed the old ones.

Not to mention, for Perosna in particular, each Perosna game tells a whole new story, so buying the fifth one is like going to see the fifth movie in a franchise: you know you like the style, and you want to experience a new story in this style. It's also not even a very long series - compare to Final Fantasy, for example, which will soon get its 17th main game (probably more like 25th or something if you included spinoffs).

> Video games don't wear out, you can still play the same software you bought in 2003 today.

The way you perceive them does, at least did back in 2023 (or 2013) and earlier.

You pick up, say, original Half Life or something from that time; story-wise it's the same game you remember, but in terms of experience, is nigh-unplayable in its original form now, because you already experienced how decades of progress in videogames look like. Not just in terms of graphics, though that is a big part, but also in terms of UI! Properly mapped controls and GUI behaviors are alone worth looking up/waiting for a remake. And/or, the Nth installment of a game in the same universe.

It may be technically an issue with some government bids, if you need to file an affidavit certifying you had no such knowledge.

But how would they prove it? And, doing so would reveal that they fucked up in the first place by sending it to you.

Play Polybius, the recent I, Robot remake, and TxK/Tempest 4000 and my meaning will become clear. For extra credit also play the original 80's I, Robot and Tempest.

I remember that one: the two blacks were not slightly different, they were both exactly black but written in different ways.

The image was in PPM format, which stores the color components of the pixels as ASCII text (so a white pixel is stored as "255 255 255" and a black one is "0 0 0"). To redact the image, the code replaced every digit of the numbers with '0', so white became "000 000 000" and black stayed as "0 0 0". Both are black and indistinguishable if you're viewing the image, but you can tell them apart by looking at the file text.

Sadly the UCC homepage seems to have vanished, but I found this account from the author: http://notanumber.net/archives/54/underhanded-c-the-leaky-re...

Well it's been continuously sold for over a decade now, and bundled with the Switch.

Wii Sports enjoyed a similar status, as it was also bundled with a console. I don't think console bundles are necessarily a fair way to count video game sales.

What's the list?!

Turn based but with QTE elements

Setting aside the big argument on whether Clair Obscur counts as turn-based, Persona 5 definitely does: it's more classically/rigidly turn-based than even the Final Fantasy games that use ATB.

You do not have to Parry. You do not have to dodge. Most od the game you can tank and heal or resurect.

A pro scene is absolutely not a sign of a popular game. Oftentimes it's the reverse. There are so many strange externalities with a healthy pro scene that can positively destroy your general appeal. Leaving you with perhaps 10,000 really insane players, and no community outside of that.

There's also a ton of multi sale per person in overwatch. Especially before role queue existed, it was easier to just spend 10 bucks on a new account to learn a hero than to suffer ELO hell while doing it. People are so toxic in competitive shooters, and playing at the ELO of your best heroes while on a hero you don't even know the abilities of is very very unpleasant. I struggle to think of a person I played with that didn't have multiple accounts, some with as many as 5-10.

This is to say nothing of the rampant cheating in the game, which if a person ever gets banned for, there is nothing stopping them from just spending 10$ on a replacement account.

It’s more interesting to me that so many are.

It’s rare for any product to have more success in later invocations than the first edition, that is where the narrative is fresh and strong- and even in the event sequels are stronger, they tend to increase sales of the first season/movie/etc; because people want the whole experience.

Sounds a bit like Legend of Dragoon. I should play that game again some time, leaving it unfinished is a shame.

Of course, if you like twitch gameplay, and if you can stomach twitch gameplay being labeled as "turn based".

I might agree with the former but I don't like false advertising.

The game is only about 30 hours and has no micro transactions. It is addictive until you beat it. Easily game of the year.