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Sega Cuts Profit Expectations by Whopping 530%, Looking to Axe 560 Employees
by Chris Faylor, Feb 10, 2009 9:58am PSTNoting that it has "failed to swiftly respond to sharp changes in the business conditions," Sega has announced that it is soliciting applications for 560 employees, roughly 18% of its workforce, to retire by the end of its fiscal year on March 31, 2009.
Assuming the company meets its proposed quota, it expects to save roughly $55.1 million on labor costs across its next fiscal year. The studio will also close or sell 110 amusement facilities, and reduce its research and development costs by about 20%.
At present, the Japanese video game publisher and developer expects to post a net loss of $236.9 million for the fiscal year, instead of its previously expected $55.1 million profit. That means its expectations are down a total of $292 million, roughly 530%.
The company cited weaker-than-expected Japanese video game sales and the weak yen-dollar exchange rate as factors in its lowering is projection.
Despite the lowered expectations, the current fiscal year is still an improvement over Sega's last fiscal year, in which the company saw a net loss of $577.4 million.
Comments
Sega used to be the king of the game world, duking it out all the time with Nintendo.
Why the did they waste money on Sega CD and Sega 32x, should've tried to make Saturn even more revolutionary and stick around with Dreamcast a little bit more and fight the monster that is Sony.
When Dreamcast died, Sega died. When Sammy bought Sega, the rotting corpse of Sega completely vaporized.
It's amazing how quickly they managed to destroy the company that had so many amazing developer groups like AM2 and original Sonic Team.
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* The council of marketers at SOA who thought Streets of Rage was a racing game and shitcanned the sequel.
* Anyone involved with Golden Axe: Beast Rider
* And / or GoldenAxe: The Duel if they're still somehow around.
* The team behind Shadow the Hedgehog, and anyone who's had physical contact with them in the last three years.
* Anyone who's drawn a weapon in either of Sonic's hands
* Big the Cat
* The person(s) who decided to stop signing Kafelnikov for Virtua Tennis. Seriously fuck you that guy is awesome.
* Anyone who thinks Phantasy Star should remain a phoned-in KoreaGrind mmo wanna be. Oh man.
* The guy who had the chance to buy the Herzog Zwei license from Technosoft when they were going under but didn't, because he said "This arr-tea-ess crap and 'robots' is going nowhere, look at that 'starcraft' shit it's only selling to those tribals in Pongyang"
* Anyone responsible for the dissolution of Team Andromeda (never forget)
* Peter Moore (yes I know, shut up, it is more ceremony than anything)
That should about do it.
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The only reason I care one wit about this is because I really, really wanna see another entry in the Phantasy Star Online series - PSU was definitely a step up gameplay-wise (after AotI) but utterly sucked in terms of production values, so a (true) next-gen sequel could do it some good - but alas, it seems they're never going to have the budget (or the marketing sense) to create a new entry in the series, and as far as I can tell there are NO contenders out there with similar gameplay (or an equally lovable art style). Le sigh.
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