As it turns out: it’s game over for Sega in the arcade gaming department. At least, in their Japanese branch, which is all the more shocking. You know, because it’s Sega’s home turf?
Game Over After Over 50 Years For Sega
Eurogamer recently released an article reporting that Sega is ending its over half a century-long reign over the Japanese arcade gaming business. According to Eurogamer, Sega had sold 85.1% of its shares in its arcade business to GENDA, which currently operates a pretty successful arcade business in Japan, back in 2020. Now it seems, according to Tojodojo and Japanese news site denfaminicogamer, Sega will sell the remaining 14.9% of its shares to GENDA as well.
Note that this means the arcades themselves will continue running. It’s just that they will now no longer feature a Sega logo. GENDA will rebrand all of the old Sega arcades into GENGA GiGO. This rebranding will occur starting in March 2022, and will continue over the next year and a half. Thus, you can expect the GiGO logos to start popping up around a month or 2 in Japan from the time of this writing.
GiGO: The New Japanese Arcade Giant?
Unfortunately, it’s entirely possible that GENDA may in fact be buying into a dying business. After all, Sega sold their long-running Japanese arcade branch to GENDA back in 2020 because of COVID-19 driving down arcade attendance and creating a trend towards at-home gaming. Understandably, this isn’t just the case in Japan either. Eurogamer reported back in August 2021 that Namco Funscape in London was permanently closing after 25 years of successful operation. If such a huge arcade could close down, then no arcade is safe.
All we can do now is hope that GENDA manages to keep those old-fashioned coin-operated arcades alive in at least one small part of the world. It’d be a shame if they went the way of the dinosaurs. All because of a certain pandemic.
Source: Eurogamer, Tojodojo, denfaminicogamer, Eurogamer
