Sega Does A Nintendo: Company Pulls Older Sonic Games Ahead Of Anthology Release
from the sega-it-ain't-so dept
I’ll admit I’ve written some posts of praise here for Sega, usually due to the company’s more lax attitude on fan-made creations alongside the company’s habit of making fun of Nintendo for going the opposite route. But taking a look at the wider number of posts we’ve done involving Sega, the company is by and large on the wrong side of most of the issues we discuss. Its copyright enforcement actions are every bit as poorly carried out as any other IP bully, it has been quite hostile to modding communities in the past, and it also has utilized Denuvo’s antipiracy platform on some of its titles, despite Denuvo being a train wreck.
And so Sega is not some white knight in the realm of intellectual property and modern business models. The latest example of this comes as the company will soon remove a bunch of standalone Sonic titles… just before Sonic Origins, an anthology that includes those older games, is due to be released.
Sonic Origins, which launches on June 23 for home consoles and PC, remasters the first three Sonic the Hedgehog games from the Sega Genesis with the aptly named Sega CD follow-up Sonic CD. Sega specifically named this collection as the reason why the four Sonic games largely won’t be available piecemeal on digital storefronts after May 20.
While delisting generally doesn’t make games you’ve already purchased unplayable, the tactic is still considered anti-consumer due to it limiting folks’ ability to purchase single games at a reduced price. In some cases, such as with BioShock and Dead Island, the newer reissues lack previous features or sport new bugs, too.
As I’ve mentioned when discussing the times Nintendo has done this very same thing, this is quite akin to Disney’s famed process for locking certain titles behind a vault to create artificial scarcity. That way, Disney, Nintendo, or Sega can control where and how the public buys its games, even in cases where those games were already released.
Yes, that is anticonsumer, which is a distanced way of saying that Sega is fucking around with its own fans. And, were that not enough to get your fur up, Sonic Origins will also include Denuvo.
Adding to the frustration is the fact that Sonic Origins will come bundled with Denuvo, a controversial anti-piracy measure, on PC.
Denuvo has long been a thorn in the side of PC gamers, with any mention of the technology provoking stern public outcry. And for good reason: It often ruins games purchased legitimately while also doing little to actually tamp down piracy. When Denuvo was added to Doom Eternal in 2020, for example, the negative response led to its removal from the first-person shooter after only a week.
It’s too bad, really. Once a monster in the industry, Sega really could carve out a space for itself by acting as a Nintendo opposite. The public would love Sega for that. There is an opportunity to build actual value into the new Sonic title in order to give the public a legit reason to buy it, rather than trying the artificial scarcity route in order to force them to.
But apparently that’s too much to ask.
Filed Under: anti-consumer, archive, denuvo, drm, sonic origins
Companies: sega
Comments on “Sega Does A Nintendo: Company Pulls Older Sonic Games Ahead Of Anthology Release”
Nintendo’s pulled plenty of bullshit over the years, but I don’t recall any examples where it’s pulled titles for sale ahead of an anthology release.
Release a crappy, overpriced anthology of old games with minimal updating? Sure, all the damn time. Shut down an entire online store and everything in it? Yup; it’ll happen again within the year. Pull individual games from an online store ahead of an anthology release? I’m drawing a blank. Do you have any specific examples?
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nintendo removed donkey kong tropical freeze and pikmin 3 from the wii u eshop when both were ported to the switch.
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In a way, you could argue that Sega’s move here is worse. At least with the example you stated, there’s an older, less successful console that they’re probably trying to get away from supporting at all and moving to a new console that (AFAIK) won’t support just loading the same game.
I’m not sure about other platforms, but there’s no reason why a PC gamer can’t still use the older version of the Sonic games, and on XBox the original XBox 360 ports are fully backward compatible on new consoles.
[…] Denuvo being a train wreck.
That’s rather unfair. A train wreck leads to better (safer) trains and policy, whereas all Denuvo does is encourage copyright infringement. After all, why bother paying for the official release when you can get a far superior product for free by docking your pirate ship in a bay?
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One day I’d love to see some kind of analysis as to how many would-be pirates are encouraged to buy because Denuvo delays day one piracy, vs. the number of people who just avoid the product and are maybe encouraged to pirate because Denuvo is present.
I can’t imagine that gathering accurate data on this would be easy, if it’s at all possible, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see a net loss on some products as a result of them including it.
To our customers
All together now: Fuuuuck yooooou!
Not only is this anti-consumer, it’s anti-preservation. I’ve seen a few people opine that the Sonic Origins version of Sonic 3 might replace several pieces of music that have been long-mired in copyright issues due to the involvement of Michael Jackson.
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There’s a Sonic 3 prototype build out there that has different pieces of music instead of the “problematic” tracks. Notably, the later Sonic & Knuckles Collection for PC uses MIDI versions of the same tracks in the same places.
So yes, it’s possible the problematic tracks will be replaced – and it sucks – but Sega won’t have to look far for replacements.
Ja0anese companies being anticonsumer?
That’s like saying Disney hates you.
Re: Pro-consumer Japanese companies exist
E.G. Capcom, Falcom, and Arc System Works.
Don’t judge an entire nation by its worst elements.
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A company’s “pro-consumer” stance doesn’t mean shit (that is, it means as much as Sega’s did last month) if they’re not willing to actually grant rights in a legally binding way. Otherwise, they’re not bringing the full weight of the law down on their fans yet.
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Why should a company have to grant rights to anyone? If I write a Resident Evil fanfic with a huge amount of original material (which I have), then I automatically have a copyright in that work without Capcom having to grant it to me. Therefore, what is your beef?
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Nobody said they should.
There’s a very good chance you’ve broken the law in doing so, and could have significant financial liability. It would be disingeneous to say Capcom is “pro-consumer” with respect to fan fiction, just because they (or whatever company eventually buys them) have not yet chosen to collect all your money. If a company wants the good publicity of being “fan-fiction-friendly”, they should have to make that official.
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Nobody said [a company] should have to grant rights].
“A company’s ‘pro-consumer’ stance doesn’t mean shit (that is, it means as much as Sega’s did last month) if they’re not willing to actually grant rights in a legally binding way.”
You were saying?
There’s a very good chance you’ve broken the law in [writing a fanfic], and could have significant financial liability.
Not according to this article.
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I don’t see what’s confusing here. Nothing in the quoted text says a company should have to grant any rights. Just that it’s disingenous for anyone to paint them as pro-consumer if they don’t.
(Apart from that, since we’re talking “should”, the public should never be reliant on the goodwill of companies to grant “rights” anyway. We shouldn’t be ceding such strict monopoly privileges to them in the first place.)
You’re referring to the “pastiche” text? That seems to good to be true, given the general reputation (mentioned in that article) that fair dealing is narrower than the USA’s fair use. But court cases in the USA have disallowed for-profit use of characters from copyrighted works (despite copyright supposedly being inapplicable to ideas), whereas the UK’s law doesn’t appear to have this restriction.
Do you have any information on how this works in practice over there? E.g., how wide is the definition of “pastiche”, and can fan fiction be sold?
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” If I write a Resident Evil fanfic with a huge amount of original material (which I have), then I automatically have a copyright in that work without Capcom having to grant it to me.”
No, you don’t. You have copyright to the stuff you created individually, but the stuff that depends on Capcom’s work is infringing unless you have a licence.
You could do what E.L. James did when she rewrote her Twilight fanfic to release as Fifty Shades Of Grey and make a killing without worrying about Capcom’s opinion. But, Capcom don’t lose veto rights over the work because you decided to add a bunch of stuff to their stuff.
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Fair use, fair dealing, etc. do not require licenses, and are not mere defenses for infringement but can mean no infringement occurred. Unfortunately, it’s sometimes unclear what’s “fair” without being sued, which leads to chilling effects.
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Or Capcom could do what they did when a rapper named Raheem Jarbo made an album with Mega Man samples and make him an “official” rapper so as not to sue him (because they loved it).
I thought the purpose of Denuvo was to delay the cracking of whatever game it’s put on, in the hopes of encouraging would-be day-one pirates to buy instead?
What exactly is the logic of putting it in this anthology, when all of the constituent games are decades old and already widely available for emulation?
For that matter, if there’s enough new content that pirates would WANT to crack this Sonic Origins, why delist the originals? Isn’t that a de-facto admission that the new anthology doesn’t create enough value to distinguish it from the old games?
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“I thought the purpose of Denuvo was to delay the cracking of whatever game it’s put on, in the hopes of encouraging would-be day-one pirates to buy instead?”
The purpose is ass covering for bad products. If the product doesn’t sell, they will wish to blame piracy rather than admit fault, and when they do that the investors will demand that they will have done something to try and stop piracy. So, they install Denuvo, probably knowing that it will just deliver a worse product to legal customers while providing little challenge to actual pirates, but they have their ass covered.
“For that matter, if there’s enough new content that pirates would WANT to crack this Sonic Origins, why delist the originals? Isn’t that a de-facto admission that the new anthology doesn’t create enough value to distinguish it from the old games?”
According to what I’ve seen there would be enough new content to encourage people to try it out even if they have the originals, but the idea is the old music industry model – if people want something, force them to buy the more expensive album bundle instead of the single song they want. As it did with the music industry, this model inevitably encourages piracy.
Their stated aim is to try and encourage more people to play the games after the success of the movies, but they don’t want those people getting away with a $5 purchase when they can charge $40…
Definitive edition
Take-two/Rockstar did this with GTA San Andreas, but that was even worse, at launch, the “remake” (if you can even call it) had glitches, issues, and even have the infamous “hot coffee” sex minigame in there.
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They were intended to be remasters, not remakes. T2 fucked up either way, but we can at least be accurate about their fuck-up.
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Thankfully that’s not a concern this time around. These fan-made remakes included in the new collection have been available exclusively on mobile for ten years, and fans have been clamouring for console and PC versions, as they’re widely regarded to be the absolute best versions ever released.
They literally started out as a proof of concept by a fan complaining about how poor the GBA port of Sonic 1 was. They painstakingly remade the entire game in a new engine with none of the errors present in the emulation for the previous releases. They put so much effort into making a genuine native 16:9 resolution version, with boss arenas redesigned to account for the changes to resolution, and tons of unlockable new features like Tails being playable in all the games, and adding toggles to enable the Sonic 3 moveset to Sonic 1 and CD, both soundtracks being selectable in CD, and even a seventh chaos emerald, and by extension Super Sonic in Sonic 1. They even did accessibility overhauls like tweaking colours on the UFOs in Sonic CD to make them more distinguishable.
This is literally like if Take Two had hired the modders responsible for all the top-rated texture, shader, lighting and model mods for the GTA games and asked them to make the GTA remasters instead.
I wouldn’t mind Denuvo at all if it auto-expired after some < 1 year time.
Most of the stuff I want to play has been around for over a year; I would never knowingly install Denuvo on a device I own though. On more than one occasion, I’ve purchased a title at a digital storefront, realized it had Denuvo, and went and downloaded a pirate copy to actually play.
This, of course, opens me up to the risk that a third party has inserted malware into the software — which unfortunately is a wash with the risks Denuvo itself brings to the table.