SEGA’s best sellers last year were SASR: Transformed and… Aliens: CM

SEGA has posted its annual financial report and its generally good news.

The company posted an annual profit of ¥33.46 billion, that’s a 53% increase on the previous year – which posted at ¥21.82 billion. So that’s all lovely. But, while SEGA’s net income was up, game sales were reported as being down 2.1% at ¥83.8 billion.

SEGA also reported that its best selling game for the finanical period was the excellent Sonic & All-Stars Racing: Transformed – selling approximately 1.36 million copies in the US and Europe.

But, in a surprise twist, SASR: Transformed was closely followed by… err… Aliens: Colonial Marines – selling 1.31 million copies. The surprise there (in case you haven’t read any gaming websites over the past few months) is that Aliens: CM is widely acknowledged as being one of the worst games this generation. It’s so bad that SEGA and Gearbox have been sued for ‘false advertising’.

I can only imagine that most of those sales are off the back of pre-orders – as SEGA embargoed all reviews of the game until launch day, so consumers had to take a gamble on whether the game was going to turn out to be good – and I reckon other sales came off the back of the ‘Aliens’ brand name alone.

SEGA’s other biggest sellers were: Football Manager 2013 (940,000 copies), Official London 2012 videogame (680,000) and Yakuza 5 (Japan-only – 590,000).

Also, the registered users for Phantasy Star Online 2 are repported at over 2.5 million – not bad for a game that is still only available in Japan.

Looking to the future, SEGA is predicting a net income of ¥47 billion yen and is hoping to sell 11.6 million units of packaged games, through releases across various platforms: 3DS (6 titles), PC (11 titles), PS3 (7 titles), PSP (2 titles), Vita (5 titles), Wii U (7 titles) and Xbox 360 (4 titles).