SEGA has announced that they will be delisting SEGA Genesis Collection, also known in some regions as SEGA Mega Drive Collection, as well as several other classic games.
The news first broke in an update for the Steam listing of Jet Set Radio, as shared by Wario64. Sega has since updated the official SEGA Classics FAQ.
SEGA does not explain the delisting, but we do have a deadline. The delisting is happening across Steam, Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo Switch on December 6, 11:59 PM PT. As you may expect, if you buy the games before the delisting, you still get to keep them. And SEGA made it clear this does not include the games found in the Genesis app in the Nintendo Switch Online subscription.
PlayStation and Switch owners will see SEGA Genesis Collection delisted, but Xbox has a lot more games, and of course the lion’s share of titles is found on Steam. You can check the official lists here.
Barring an official explanation, one would not be blamed for assuming the worst; that SEGA is delisting the collection now so that they can resell them in a few years’ time.
And the irony of this is this news comes a day after SEGA’s global head of transmedia, Justine Scarpone, claimed in a new interview that the company is planning to revive their classic franchises with video games, but also in a media mix in film and television.
But maybe it would be a mistake to see this as contradictory to that statement. In fact, it’s possible that the delisting is part of those plans.
As old-time SEGA fans may remember, the company has been reselling their Sega Genesis library for a very long time. That goes as far back as Sonic Jam on the Sega Saturn, just three years after the last games in that collection came to Genesis.
SEGA, like other game companies with classic libraries, face the challenge of updating their classic games to meet the needs and expectations of newer platforms. Many gamers may feel that there isn’t a lot they can do to these games at all, and we have been literally getting the same Genesis ROMs resold in different presentations over and over.
Sega 3D Classics on the 3DS arguably makes the best case for ports that really improved on classic games, but it’s also true that the appetite for these games is somewhat unending, as long as they are served in cycles. We can only hope that the next time SEGA offers us a collection or anthology of these classic games, they can find a way to make it worthwhile.
