Last week retrogamers were a bit blindsided by the sudden launch of Sega Forever, a new mobile service that promised a wide range of free-to-play classics from the Master System, Genesis, Saturn, and Dreamcast. Sega Forever is ad-supported, but players can pay $2 to remove them. Sounds like a pretty good idea, right?
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Unfortunately, Sega Forever has been roundly criticized for poor emulation and a host of other issues. Launch titles Sonic the Hedgehog, Comix Zone, Phantasy Star II, Kid Chameleon, and Altered Beast have been beset with bugs, input lag, audio glitches, and framerate issues. Yes, games that ran just fine on the Sega Genesis in the early 90s are dragging on mobile devices literally a 1000 times more powerful. While reviews on the App store have been marginally positive overall, there’s a large contingent of very dissatisfied customers.
Despite the rocky launch, Sega’s chief marketing officer Mike Evans was ready to defend Sega Forever when pressed for answers by Eurogamer.
“The launch [of Sega Forever] has been really positive – if you look at the vast majority of feedback it’s been strong. Is there room for improvement like anything? Yeah there is. It’s a very ambitious project, and it’s taken a long time to get to this point. It’s an ongoing program, and we’ve got lots of things planned as we go through, and we’re going to keep on working on that quality. For the vast majority of our fans it’s solid, but the specialist guys who are looking for the absolute epitome of quality, we’re going to keep improving for those guys.”
Feeling a bit salty, Eurogamer outright asked Evans whether Sega Forever was a cash grab…
“No. This is a passion project for us. It’s really something that’s going to be done on an amazing scale. If you look at this project it’s not a high-yielding project for Sega, it provides enough cash to make it viable but it’s about getting the IP to the fans and allow them to rediscover it.”
Honestly, is anybody overly surprised Sega Forever turned out this way? Sega has plenty of good intentions, but, with rare exceptions, the execution is usually lacking. Hopefully they turn Sega Forever around, because it really is a great service in theory, but I have my doubts.
You can learn more about Sega Forever and its available games, right here.
[via Eurogamer]
