The mobile market can be fickle, and Sega is experiencing this firsthand right now. In its latest financial results, the publisher has confirmed that it will be incurring an “extraordinary loss” of $55 million for this financial year. This loss is being attributed to “intensifying competition”, as well as the decline of its existing mobile games.
“[Sega’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’s statement reads, adding, “[Sega] aimed to increase revenues through the introduction of new titles in this fiscal year but it is expected that such will not compensate for the slowdown of existing mainstay titles due to such reasons as the introduction of new titles being delayed and the performance of introduced titles has been below our expectation.”
Speaking about how it plans to counter this decline, Sega has noted that it plans to leverage its own IP to increase its value, as well have tie-ins with external IP to try and make their own games more attractive (which could be referencing crossovers for their mobile and console games). Sega also mentions making its internal development processes more efficient to try and make development more profitable than it currently is.
Sega has recently been staging a comeback, off the back of games such as Sonic Mania, Yakuza 0, and Persona 5. I sincerely hope that this comeback is not derailed, and that they will be able to reveal loads of exciting new projects for us soon enough.