Topic: Sega Purchasing Atlus

[Steel Diver]

The makers of Etrian Odyssey and Shin Megami Tensei are being purchased by Sega.

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/news/35454

Sega Sammy Holdings (Sega's parent company) is purchasing Index Corporation (Atlus's parent company) for a reported 14 billion yen, $141 million USD.

Sega will reorganize Atlus into its company and, according to Atlus previously, their brands will not change because of new ownership.

[Wah]

Don't even remeber Atlus....

[Ian Sane]

... and that's the end of Atlus.  Damn shame because they were one of the only Japanese companies left that seemed to have some consistent quality and made games that actually felt Japanese instead of misguided attempts to make "Western" style games.

[azeke]

That's surprisingly cheap for a company of this caliber. One company i know of could at least tried to get on it or something...

Sega's being weird lately, their sugardaddy, Sammy doesn't seem to mind Sega's continuing failures and keeps investing more and more and into it with buying Relic and now Atlus.

[Luigi Dude]

... and that's the end of Atlus.  Damn shame because they were one of the only Japanese companies left that seemed to have some consistent quality and made games that actually felt Japanese instead of misguided attempts to make "Western" style games.

Well Sega still makes some Japanese style games, it's just they rarely localize them anymore.  Considering most of Atlus games are very Japanese, there chances of being localized are now much lower.

So even if Atlus is still allowed to stay the same, most of their games probably won't leave Japan anymore.

[nickmitch]

How much can Nintendo benefit from this? They're pretty close with Sega right now, right?

[BlackNMild2k1]

That's surprisingly cheap for a company of this caliber. One company i know of could at least tried to get on it or something...

Sega's being weird lately, their sugardaddy, Sammy doesn't seem to mind Sega's continuing failures and keeps investing more and more and into it with buying Relic and now Atlus.

Gotta spend money to make money.
Gotta take risk to reap the rewards.

[shingi_70]

How much can Nintendo benefit from this? They're pretty close with Sega right now, right?

It remains to be seen. While Nintendo has the sonic franchise locked down right now, Sony is pretty tied to sega through the Yakuza and Phantasy Star Series. On the actual atlus side of things Nintendo has been pretty tight with even a crossover game coming.  Sony still has dibs on Persona still the most popular of Atlus games.

[nickmitch]

So, I guess that makes it pretty up in the air. Still, I'd like to think that Nintendo could do more for Sega than Sony can. I mean, isn't the Mario & Sonic blah blah Olympics a pretty popular series? Surely there's more room for cross over. Or at least big promotions of new Sega IPs. Or at lesser than least, a Billy Hatcher sequel.

[BlackNMild2k1]

You'd figure the last 2 Good Ol'boys would really want to help each other out especially since they aren't competing in the hardware space anymore.

Sega (should) have a beef with EA. and EA has a beef with Nintendo.
So if Sega could fill that void in Nintendo's line-up, that could be a jab at EA.

I'm reaching for reasons here, but I'm sure they could come up with some backroom deals to get something going. They could both really use each other.

[nickmitch]

Well, Nintendo currently has a void where sports games should be and Sega has some experience with that kinda problem and a passion for cross-overs. What I'm saying is Mario/Sonic (American) Football means Nintendo gets all the RPGs and wins the generation.