I don't want to walk into a minefield and I guess you have every right to be passionate about your collection & love of a particular company (even if in a specific time period), but considering the number of lawsuits that occur in the gaming industry, my guess is that if you let that sway you, you could get to the point where you felt that most companies were at one anothers throats over one thing or another and just in it for the money! Do you genuinely think that Codemasters actually damaged Sega in any way? And as the supplier of those beautiful chocolate brownies (I am actually hungry now) surely I'd be entitled to take my product to whichever bakery did me the best deal? All those additional $0.05 stack up! Whether it's a kick in the knackers, I'd say no. Sega are like any other business and these things do happen. The bigger case imo was against Accolade which was around 1992/93 - http://www.virtualrecordings.com/sega.htm If you wish to vent your spleen at anyone, perhaps you should at this guy LOL : http://www.3newsquare.co.uk/html/guy_burkill.htm It clearly states however that the case of Sega V Codemasters was a "first instance case" and went no further, so clearly the judge felt that Codemasters were entitled to act as they did. My knowledge of US law (especially in this field) is limited to say the least, but I am sure someone like Barc0de could step in here with his better patent / intellectual property knowledge. Inadvertantly it may have paved the way for the case against Accolade, however that is hardly the fault of Codemasters.
;-) ...this all started with a simple.... look at Codemasters new logo! ;-) I love this site for the in-depth passion displayed by enthusiasts.
I actually do feel that those three examples actually hurt SEGA. Maybe not on a grand scale, but I still feel it's a rather dubious way of doing business from Codemasters part. Another thing that bugs me is that something good might've could out of this. Look at the relation between SEGA and companies such as Bizarre Creations; Bizarre made some good money on the Dreamcast with MSR (and Fur Fighters, which also seemed to do pretty well). When the Dreamcast went down Bizarre went their way (and there wasn't anything much in development left so that's perfectly logical) but recently found their way back to SEGA with a partnership for 'The Club'. Now I know Bizarre are SEGA fans at heart and more likely to stick with them but it's nice to see such things. I'm a firm believer that if developers stick with certain platforms / publishers the overall quality of the games is on an overall higher level. An example would be Rare. While Viva pinãta did pretty well, who's talking about it these days? Of course there's also examples of developers sticking with a certain publisher for too long, but overall I think there's truth in it.
If I was to boycott every game company who'd screwed over another company during their history, I'd not be able to buy many games. It's just not the kind of thing to get worked up over.
Or perhaps this is closer: A large bakery chain offers to sell your brownies. The bakery has a nice range of products but they rarely advise their products and rely mostly on word of mouth and past custom. For some bizarre reason they spend most of their advertising budget to sponsor several football teams. In the meantime you come up with a nice new brownie recipe that is sure to sell extremely well if sold at the right price in a place that has good exposure to the market. Suddenly you get the chance to turn said brownies into a brand for a large supermarket chain that will sell your new brownies nationwide. No question which option you'd take, right? For the Saturn consider this: The ultimate rally game of the time gets launched, namely Sega Rally. Although it's an arcade racer and Colin Mcrae is closer to the real motor sport, the chances are that it's going to be compared unfavourably with SR. No surprise the first game saw a PS release instead. The Saturn was also a complex machine to develop for and thus more costly. Chances are that it would take a longer development cycle to get MMV3 up and running well on the Saturn, and for a small company that is a big risk to take when you can't be certain of the large sales you're more likely to get with the PlayStation. Now comes the Dreamcast. V-Rally bombed on the system. MSR was much hyped and great things were expected, but that too bombed at retail. If you check out recent interviews with Bizarre Creations, you'll see that MSR was a big let down for them and they were actually saved from going under by Microsoft (a lot of their own money was invested in MSR being a success). To back this up, in an Edge 'The Making of' article about MSR (September 2006), you'll find this quote on page 105: Knowing this, would you risk launching a new racing game on the system? Bear in mind that launching a game is not as simple as it sounds, you don't just ring up Sega and say "Hi! We'd like a 100k run please". You have to think about distribution, promotion, convincing the stores to give you shelf space etc etc. You have to buy a set number of copies of the game from Sega, which is a fairly large initial investment. Also, Rally games are not typically popular outside of Europe, so you already have a fairly limited market anyway. Cut them a little slack.
Certainly, but why would you limit yourself to one market? Codemasters would've made perfectly good money releasing the games that were in development, especially when you consider the market at the time they were ready for release. Colin Mcrae came way after the Saturn bombed (from the second part '97 onwards) , it was never even considered for Saturn release, because it wasn't around. MMV3 was actually one of the first confirmed PAL Saturn games in development. Source? Then why did they bother to release it in the USA is they knew the game bombed in Europe? Still, releasing the game relatively close to 4 Wheel thunder (and with Sega Rally 2 already on the market) never helped much, did it? Anyway, Colin Mcrae was 99% finished and would've been sold in a healthy Dreamcast market (2000), there's no way Codemasters would've suffered at ALL from releasing it. They actually would've lost quite some money from cancelling it if Sony didn't came along. If MSR really did bomb (and I severely doubt that, I wouldn't call 120k copies bombing even while that was well below expectations) there's two things to keep in mind; it was supposed to be a launch game; Bizarre spent the entire time 'till release tweaking and improving the game. Which is great, but you can't help but lose interest in a game when it fails to come in month after month. Secondly, the game came into the shops with some serious bugs and loads of copies were recalled/repressed, now what did that cost them? If Bizarre had financial trouble after the Dreamcast projects there's four reasons; -They simply took too long to release the MSR game. (even while it was justified) -They had to recall discs and bugged copies had to be replaced. -SEGA failed to advertise the game enough. -Their other project 'Fur Fighters' didn't do too well (see below). If you take at look at the market during the day (final quarter 2000) , the PS2 software sales weren't THAT good (the DC outsold the PS2 X-mas 2000 I recall). Bizarre also gave the rights to publish Fur Fighters on the PS2 and PC to Acclaim so if it sold great on the PS2 or PC they would've had no problems to stay in business.
