Fans of Phantasy Star Online 2 plan to release the game stateside [UPDATED]
Greetings, true believers. Who here remembers the announcement of Phantasy Star Online 2? SEGA planned on bringing the popular MMO to west in “early 2013”. Two years have passed and SEGA still hasn’t given a detailed answer as to why PSO2 was not released yet. Kotaku writer, Jason Schreier, asked a SEGA representative about the status of Phantasy Star Online 2 and this is what he got:
Sega: Regarding the below, nothing has changed. The game is still delayed and we will update everyone as soon as we know more.
Schreier: Surely at this point it’s more than just a simple delay, no? I know more than a few readers have been waiting patiently for the game to come here, and they expected the release window to be “early 2013” – you guys really can’t help clarify things for them?
Sega: The game is delayed and we will share more info as soon as we know more.
UPDATE: SEGA has issued a statement in regards to the PSO2 story posted the other day [via Kotaku] :
We don’t have a comment on PSO2 in general beyond what we’ve already said before – that the game is delayed and that we’ll update the public when we have any news.
SEGA seems pretty tight lipped about the whole thing. Leave it to a ragtag group of dedicated fans to come in and save the day (I think that’d make a pretty kick-ass Power Rangers plot). PSO fans, Cyberkitsune and AIDA, came together to create Project Polaris, a private Phantasy Star Online 2 server project. The team, which consists of five or so people, “has reverse engineered enough of the game to have their private server up and running behind closed doors.” Despite the Polaris project showing a lot of promise, it is still in its early stages.
You might be wondering, true believers, “What does SEGA think about this whole shebang?” Well, according to Kotaku’s Steve Bowling, nothing yet. Cyberkitsune hopes SEGA would allow Polaris to go forward or at least force SEGA to release PSO2 themselves. It’s unfortunate that fans have to try and create this themselves, but I’m glad that someone is doing something about it. The fans deserve some form of explanation for the game’s delay besides, “The game is delayed. We will share more info as we get it.” We’ll just have to see if SEGA responds in the near future. What do you think about this whole situation? Leave your comment below and let us know!
[via Kotaku]
Sega has always been terrible when it comes to RPG support especially for western releases.
I agree, Kye. Yakuza & Shenmue come to mind.
The answer is simple, the same mindset that forced them from being a gaming giant to a 3rd party nostalgia driven shade of its former glory with no where near the wealth of creativity and finances to do anything but re-release decades old content and shell out glitchy unfinished shit fests is again taken hold. I was a huge sega fan. But straight up. Sega died with the Dreamcast. They have always made terrible bussiness decisions, they refused to venture in to new business practices. They are stuck in an old way of thinking and it’s cost them everything. I have no doubt that with in the next 10 to 20 years sega will no longer exist at all. They are basically this generations Atari. Shame really.
I think most of us waited 4 years for the game as most of us were tracking it before its release. Being a “big time” gaming company SEGA should be aware of that and me personally would have aimed for releases that were within days of one another. Every game that sells millions in of copies in the first week use this method (i.e. Halo: Series, ESO, etc.). It’s just common knowledge at this point everyone has been waiting for the eastern version to replace PSU since they closed it. To think how much money they could still be making had they left it up until a few weeks before the PSO2 launch day. Kudos to the fans forcing their hand and/or getting the game to play here.
I hope that the creation of a private server will either force them to give us an official release state side, or that the private server is successful. Either one would be fantastic.
Sign this petition now while we have a fighting chance.
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/re-gain-our-trust-sega-phantasy-star-online-2
Sega, along with konami and a good potion of Japanese game developers are run by old jaded racists, men who would rather run with a Japanese only business practice, it’s that simple. and it’s nothing new, remember the super Mario port in the 90’s?