Thank **** for that. He's one of the few persons at SEGA that turn around the mess. (well, at least keep total disaster out the door..)
ok, but he's still in a chair in front of a window, paying the debt of shenmue.. damn videogame industry...
just how badly did shenmue do? i mean not just vague generalizations wise, but in reality. i also <3 him for having the balls to make that game.
Well, it cost millions to make, 30 million I think. I heard that each DC owner would have had to have bought it twice for SEGA to break even. SEGA let it be made though, and I thank them for that. It's one of the games I will look back on fondly. The latest god-knows-what that gets churned out I will never remember, but Shenmue is like a part of my life. I loved growing up with SEGA and am still gobsmacked at how the company completely ballzed up everything from 1994 onwards pretty much. They were more popular than Nintendo in some markets. I know the MD was cooler to have than the SNES back in the day. Dreamcast, 1998 ?? Too early. Amazing tech. VMUs are so friggin sweet - the arcade stick is awesome on the DC... The DC should have been released in 2001 with a DVD player built in. Would have owned the market. Ooops.
Hmmm... yeah, that's definitely not right. But, it's true that it didn't sell well. The fact is, the gaming population that cares about quality games is now the minority. You have to churn out crap to survive.
Well this really sucks ass. 'Creative Officer'? man even the title sounds dull... Most of gawker media does, gizmodo has a me-love-you-long-time relation with apple (even when I havent seen an apple ad on their site, ever) and are tagged as fanboys most of the time. Kotaku has a similar relation regarding PAX though. Not really, what SEGA needs is their own steve jobs. Believe it or not theres a big parallelism between SEGA and the late 90s Apple. That last one had to give up to clones, just to lose even more money. Had a large trail of very innovative yet disastrous products (newton) and was pretty much bankrupt in 97 when jobs came back. The only guy I think could do for SEGA what jobs did for Apple if Kalinske, but I doubt he would be interested. About shenmue's cost, look, it was a flagship title, period. Car companies lose millions or more making expensive models that are nothing but technology demostrators (for example honda's fcx cars). The point of shenmue was to show how big and advanced games on the Dreamcast could be. Too bad the PS2 hype was even bigger...
ps2 hype was big, but not the capability to even do shenmue!!! of course it was an extremely powerfull console, but i will never understand why shenmue can't be ported..
I'm sure this discussion has been done time and time again. It can, it's just how much time do you want to port a game that was written very tightly around a specific piece of hardware, and didn't sell well.
Seems more like Sega left Yu Suzuki. Man like that needs a big flourishing company for his ideas to flourish.
Seriously I think the Yakuza game is an attempt by Sega to see if a slightly modified version of a Shenmue game would sell. And Yakuza is selling. I also think Shenmue's poor Sales are attributed to 1 thing and that being that the dreamcast's install base was so low that not everyone was going to buy it. Perhaps my Dreamcast standards it was a hit but by large console standards it was not also probably the only people that bought Shenmue II on XBOX were former dreamcast owners but Like other sega games word of mouth set in and people wanted to see it again and experence what this ambitous Shenmue was. Hence Sega Made Yakuza to see if a Shenmue style game would still sell. That said Last weekend I went back and played Shenmue II on my 360 It hasn't aged well in the least.
The DC had a very respectable userbase at the time shenmue was released (during the DC heyday) and yet not every user got a copy. How can you be 27 and not remember that? you where around 19 back then if my calculations arent wrong.
If by "slightly modified" you mean "completely different", then you are right. The similarities of these games stop with a "you control a character walking around".
