My gripe with Sega is the same one I have with a lot of Japanese companies right now, which is that they're tossing internal development aside in favor of hiring third parties to do more Western-style games. There's a conscious effort to steer away from things that might be construed as "too Japanese" because they all want a taste of the kind of sales figures that series like Call of Duty can pull down, and this sentiment is heavily reinforced by US and European gaming sites.
Sega seems to have a particular affinity for sending their games off to die, though. Just look at Valkyria Chronicles.
I don't think that's true - they're still producing *very* "Japanese style" games, they're just keeping them in Japan. Hatsune Miku anything, Shining series, Sangokushi Taisen, etc. Valkyria Chronicles didn't "go off to die", Sega put it on the format with the best sales-to-dev-cost in Japan. Falcom didn't release all their games on PSP by accident, it's (still!) a significant and profitable format in Japan.
As for Shenmue... I don't have a lot of sympathy for Yu Suzuki on that one. He farted around for years on it (
this video alone proves that he'd already got up to Shenmue
2 on the
Saturn) and spent millions, if the rumours are to be believed to the point where every Dreamcast owner needed to buy multiple copies for the game to break even. Sega's support for the game can't be faulted IMO, but you can't blame them for not funding Shenmue 3 when history proves that it would have been cheaper for them to flush $10,000,000 down the toilet than make another Shenmue.
