It seems there's no shortage of bad news for publishers, as Sega reported an extraordinary loss of as much as $55 million in the fiscal year, attributing it to the slowing performance of existing titles and mobile game competition in Japan.
The report states that "the Company’s existing mainstay titles have slowed down as the service has been operated over long term while the competition in the Japanese mobile game market intensifies."
Sega apparently tried to combat this by introducing new titles this fiscal year but they don't believe it will be sufficient to compensate for the slowing performance of the existing ones, "due to such reasons as the introduction of new titles being delayed and the performance of introduced titles has been below our expectation".
According to the statement, Sega's packaged games department has done better in this respect, although it was again insufficient to make up for the losses in the digital games sector.
As unfortunate as the news may be, Sega fans should be delighted with the following news, as the company will be looking to address these losses by focusing on own IPs.
"The Company will accelerate intellectual property (IPs) oriented business roll-out to maximize the value of IPs owned by the Group while actively utilizing external IPs in an effort to increase revenue", they wrote.
They also stated the intention of pursuing more effective use of resources, adjusting the scale of their mobile gaming business to increase revenue and there's even talk of "organizational integration, restructuring, etc."
Speaking of own IPs, Sega have already jumped aboard the remake train, with Yakuza Kiwami slated for launch on 19 February 2019, which is less than two weeks away. The game is a remake of the first instalment in the Yakuza franchise, a highly acclaimed PlayStation 2 classic that launched in 2005 or 2006, depending on where you're from.
Sega
As you'd expect, the aforementioned extraordinary loss meant that the company had to adjust their financial forecasts accordingly, the details of which you can find in the official statement .
