Phantasy Star: Fringes of Algo

Have you heard the news about Sega during this last week? They announced via a press releasse that five offices under the management of Sega Europe are closing. Sega is withdrawing from Australia, Benelux, France, Germany and Spain. Some of the employees losing jobs in this are setting up companies that will be responsible to distributing Sega titles in those areas, so hopefully not too many people are out of a job. It probably means a more limited selection of Sega games for those places, though.

Today, Sega also announced the creation of a new subsidiary named Sega Networks. Based in Japan, this branch is going to be working on content for mobile platforms to be distributed worldwide. Sega's PR people have mentioned that digital was going to be a focus of the company moving forward, so this may be a reflection of that.

What do you think of these moves? If you live in an area affected by the closures, do you think it will impact your game buying habits in the future?

Haven't heard that yet until reading it here. It doesn't sound good about the closings, for whatever reason. Hope they are not in some kind of bad trouble or something.

I've heard about it for France (logical !^^) but I didn't know about the other european countries and Australia That's sad but video game companies are also facing the actual economical crisis so...

I don't think it will impact my game buying habits in the future because I'm not a great video game buyer anymore but that's really so sad....SEGA was (a part of) all my childhood ...

The fact is that Sega is on its way to bankruptcy, sadly. They want to concentrate now only on most lucrative IPs (Sonic and 3 or 4 other IPs), shutdown almost all operations outside Japan and invest on social games where they can sell items for money.

For me it is clear that Sega lost all its will of trying to be a great and innovative game developer, and is looking for easy money or nothing. And I believe Sega will sadly end with the seecond option.

They do seem to be going in that direction, don't they? It's very sad to see a gaming company that was once so great and brought so many excellent games falling this far. Digital seems to be the way even the most successful companies are aiming to go now, but I can't help feeling that the decision to concentrate only on those few IPs is going to really doom Sega in the long run. They have such a vast library, but it means nothing if they won't leverage it.

Yep, they are going in a very wrong direction, as I'm not really (totally !!) fond of social gaming (I hate facebook games and other ones...)
SEGA isn't what it used to be anymore, but that is from very long years, unfortunately...