Iron Man 2, Alpha Protocol Struggle But Sega's Q1 Sales Up 51%

Japanese publisher Sega has reported its first-quarter earnings for the period ended June 30, revealing relatively poor sales of Alpha Protocol and Iron Man 2.  Supplementary information from Sega shows that Alpha Protocol sold only 700,000 units globally, while Iron Man 2 fared slightly better at 1.12 million units sold worldwide. "While domestic sales were mostly firm, in the overseas markets, sales of new titles remained slow as affected by the adverse market condition," Sega said.

The publisher acknowledged that it needs to focus more on emerging markets like mobile and social gaming. "The Group needs to adapt to changing business environment in which the market demand for new content geared to social networking service (SNS) and smartphone is expanding," Sega remarked.

In the home console business, Sega said it sold through 1.68 million video game copies in the U.S., 1.33 million copies in Europe and 270,000 copies in Japan and other regions, for a total of 3.29 million copies. Despite the somewhat poor showings from Alpha Protocol and Iron Man 2, Sega's revenues jumped 51.1% to 91.3 billion yen, while net income came to 7.04 billion yen - a vast improvement over last year's net loss of 10.29 billion yen. 

The key to Sega's overall success in the quarter was actually its pachinko and pachislot business, which more than doubled revenues year-over-year to post sales of 48.9 billion yen. Sega also benefited from its toy sales division, as sales of  Bakugan "remained solid" both in Japan and overseas. Lastly, Sega said its mobile phone and PC content business remained solid, and the publisher mostly credited downloadable games for PCs.