Lost Judgment may be the final game in Sega's Judgment series, due to disagreement with talent agency over PC release

[Jizz_Beard_thePirate]

shikamaru317 said:

Captain_Yuri said:

The article already makes it sound like they cancelled the series after Lost Judgement so I doubt it will be #2. If anything, #3 is the most likely:

I am doubtful of that personally. Cancelling a successful series over a single missing platform seems extreme, unless that platform is your lead platform in sales. While we have no baseline to compare Judgment sales on PC to, since the remaster of the first Judgment wasn't on Steam, we can look at the sales for past Rya Ga Gotoku studio games on Steam to get an idea of the sales potential:

• Yakuza 0: 1-2m range on Steam Spy (I think it was bundled more than once with other Sega games for a cheap price)
• Yakuza Like A Dragon: 200-500k range (the first ever Yakuza series game to release day one on PC)
• Yakuza Kiwami: 200-500k range
• Yakuza Kiwami 2: 200-500k range
• Yakuza 3 Remaster: 100-200k range
• Yakuza 4 Remaster: 50-100k range
• Yakuza 5 Remaster- 50-100k range

While Yakuza 0 had strong sales, it seems to be an outlier, with numbers driven artificially high by bundling and late life discounts (it's currently on sale for 75% off at $5 for instance). The others are all less than 500k sales so far. I'm just not sure if it's worth cancelling a series over those sales numbers on PC, when they can release Judgment games on PS5/PS Now, Xbox Series/xCloud, Stadia, Luna, and maybe Switch 2 once it releases. Maybe they will choose to create a new main character for future Judgment games instead, but I personally think they'd be better off just skipping Steam and leaving PC players with the option to play on Streaming with PS Now, xCloud through Gamepass, Stadia, or Luna. I mean obviously that would suck for PC gamers, to be forced to play the game on Streaming, but it's better than not being able to play the game at all, and better than cancelling the whole series over a single platform. 

500k for a niche series like Yakuza isn't exactly low either but this isn't even just about that. Having a talent company dictate what you can do with your business is bad for business. What if one day, the Talent company decides xbox is too western for their liking? Or they hate the Cloud for some reason reason? Or other terrible decisions? That might sound stupid but the reason it's not coming to PC is in itself stupid. On top of that, Sega themselves says that PC is vital for them so it's pretty clear that they see the PC sales as strong sales. It's not like they are getting rid of the writers or the game developers or anything like that. They are just changing the main characters and rebooting the series. Judgment is also not their main series either, it's their spin off series. It's better for them to start a new series without all the nonsense than be strong armed by a Talent company with backwards thinking.

I am pretty sure if they limited the PC version to cloud, virtually no one would touch it on PC. I think most would rather skip the game entirely than to try a cloud version as cloud on PC has never been successful. Personally as a person that owned Yakuza 0 and bought Yakuza Like a Dragon on day 1 on Steam, I'd certainly skip the cloud version.