Board Thread:Questions and Answers/@comment-6858788-20150315054829/@comment-679780-20150315183712

MrBreada wrote: I agree. As much as I hate to say this, I think that Sega needs to abandon Nintendo for the next Sonic game. Although the Wii U is powerful, the Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC are capable of much more.

However, if Sega doesn't focus on detail like you suggested, Wii U support is fine. Their are some pros and cons to Sega breaking off partnership from Nintendo. I'm a bit of a pessimistism so I'll start with the cons.

Cons
I believe Nintendo pretty much grasping Sega's balls firmly in order to keep them in partnership. With Sega on their consoles Nintendo get to sell more games than they would seperately and able to take some authority over Sega's production in order to influence their audience for Nintendo's interest. Why else would Sonic Lost World end up a Super Mario Galaxy knock-off with plenty of Nintendo based DLCs? It's obvious Nintendo had too much of a say in it's development. Hardcore Sonic fans shouldn't praise Sega for having Nintendo content in Sonic games but ask "Why?" with sceptism.

Nintendo would be reluctant to relieve Sega from their "partnership" and I don't care how awesome or saintly most believe Nintendo is, if Nintendo found Sega as competition it will stamp it out. Sure some would argue that since Sega are reliant on other consoles and not enough money for themselves but Sega once held it's own against Nintendo throughout the 90s and Nintendo will not take it likely. I bet Nintendo will push Sega down the stairs and the audience will just blame Sega for it's stupidity.

Another con I mention is money. I think Sega has made quite a bit of profit over the years but I don't think they're swimming in money and on a budget. Being partners with Nintendo perhaps give them grants and so and they also have licences to make games on other consoles which Nintendo is cool with. We know Sega makes games for the Wii U but we don't know if they can mae games for the XBox One or PlayStation 4 yet. (Until we find out will be the day I get such consoles.)

Pros
With modern technology today, I bet if Sega wanted to get back into console manufacturing business, they could make a cheap knock-off of the Wii U and still hold their own. Throughout the 90s Sega prooved to be skilled at marketing. The quality of the Mega Drive was inferior to the Super Nintendo Entertainment System but this was becauses the Mega Drive was competing with the NES at the time. When the SNES came out instead of making a brand new console to compete they worked wit hthe Mega Drive to make it worthy competition with the SNES, bringing out brand new concepts such as plastic boxes for game cartridges to make storage easier, online play with the Sega Meganet and Sega Channel which were new to game consoles at the time. Over time more peripherals was added to the Mega Drive which was actually a bit of a fault with the 32X upgrading the console and the Sega-CD introduced and third-party game developers not knowing what to do with it (but the Sega CD introducing CD based gaming to home consoles, thank you Sega!) So Sega decided to move onto the Sega Saturn.

The point I am getting at is even if Sega decides not to make new consoles, they could still hold their own. Without Sega breathing down their necks and if Sony or Microsoft cool with it they could make games exclusively for the XBone and PS4. and with the graphics these consoles can provde they wouldn't even need to use all those gems! Alternatively they can simply move onto home computers. Perhaps even follow the marketing steps of Steam and make their own social networking software exclusively for Sega games. Such a social networking site will give them the advantage to adapt it to any future projects.

So yeah, Sega could hold their own if they wanted too.