Sega releases all retro games for free (sort of)

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-06-21-segas-back-catalogue-is-headed-to-mobile-with-sega-forever

That's a pretty grand ambition, and it's attached to a project that feels fairly grand when viewed in the right light. A few weeks back I went to London to hear about Sega Forever, an initiative that will see Sega releasing a load of its classic games onto mobile platforms - iOS and Android - over the course of a few years. These games will be free, and surprisingly lightly monetised. You can play them forever without paying, or you can spend a one-off fee of £1.99 to ditch the ads, which appear on the start screen, the save screen, and I think at launch, but will not interrupt play in anyway. The games are emulated or, in the case of Dreamcast titles, ported, and they'll have virtual buttons, but you can use a controller if you have one, and while each game is its own download, its own app, there are commonalities uniting them all: leaderboards, cloud saves - local saves if you pay that £1.99, although you can play the game offline for free - and, at some point after launch, multiplayer, initially over wi-fi but eventually over 3G and 4G if Sega's hopes pan out.

Cool,never got a sega console

I think it's a smart move to play the retro card. I just hope they can afford the development costs and the costs of it's upkeep if majority of consumers choose to play for free and watch commercials. I would love to play Sonic, Vectorman, Old School Batman Forever, Earthworm Jim, and Streets of Rage. Bring it on!

Sega basically realized everyone was emulating them anyway, so why not just put a few ads on them and give em away?

Ipega controllers (very cheap) work great with tablets and phones Certainly cheaper than a NES with 30 games.

Finally! Phantasy Star with me at all times

@uninspiredcup: now that's a pretty neat controller .... and for what I'm seeing now they aren't even expensive, thanks for the heads up ! My kid is going to love it.

It'll be neat if Sega would get back into the console business.

To be that good takes ages.

Fools, I'd pay to play a lot of their older stuff if they'd only release them. But not on my cellphone.

Can they put this on PC?

http://segabits.com/blog/2017/06/21/sega-news-bits-sega-forever-officially-revealed-reaction/

@uninspiredcup: I would very much love them to be om GOG as well. Now that most of good ol' PC games without a clusterfucked license issue is on their catalogue, they should start looking for ways to get official emulations.

Apparently it's having issues because it's running on Unity. Originally it was suppose to use the most, most, most excellent Retroarch, but Sega wanted total control of it.

Sega has released five of its classic games as free mobile ports on iOS and Android. These include: Sonic The Hedgehog, Phantasy Star 2, Comix Zone, Kid Chameleon, and Altered Beast.

This new line-up is part of what the publisher calls Sega Forever, a new initiative to get its best retro games available for a mobile audience. More titles will be added each month.

All games are completely free with ads, though these can be disabled should one spend a one-time payment of £1.99.

One appealing feature about this Sega Forever line-up is that these games offer modern features like cloud saves, leaderboards, and Bluetooth controller support.

Some of these games were already available on mobile, such as Altered Beast, Phantasy Star 2, and Sonic The Hedgehog. If you owned these games before, you should be able to get the updated ad-free versions of them at no additional cost, though we've found this feature isn't working for Sonic where the "recover purchase" simply times out. We're not alone in this either, as Touch Arcade reported the same problem.

That's only the tip of the iceberg, however, as there's a much bigger problem with this Sega Forever line-up: these ports offer significantly worse performance than that of their older versions, even on more modern hardware.

Allegedly this is because these retro classics were ported over in Unity. Our Digital Foundry tech aficionado John Linneman said "Do not touch those Sega Forever games," noting that they're "lousy emulation in a Unity wrapper."

"The games are designed to run at 60 frames per second. This emulator tries to do that but drops frames resulting in something that looks more like ~45 fps or so. There are loads of dropped frames, hitches and skips," he said.

"30fps is bad, but an even, stable 30fps would have been better than this. The issue here is that it skips and stutters during gameplay. And when a notification occurs, it gets much worse. So it never plays smoothly."

Even weirder is that these low-tech titles played far better on older hardware, due to more optimised emulation. "iPhone 3GS could play those old apps at a full 60fps while iPhone 6S+ with the new apps cannot," Linneman explained.

"To put it into perspective, Sega had previously released versions of many of these Genesis games on iOS that were emulated. Those could run at 60fps on an iPhone 3GS in 2009. Eight year later and they run worse on much faster hardware due to an un-optimised emulator."

He postulated that another emulator, RetroArch, would have been a much better fit for the project, though its developer Libretro said it couldn't reach an agreement with Sega on its terms of service.

"Sorry to all the people that are experiencing subpar performance with this Unity thing," the RetroArch devs tweeted. "They could have been using RetroArch right now if they hadn't been so stubbornly insistent on demanding we relicense our entire program to something that would strip us of all our rights, on top of some other unreasonable things like not showing any branding, etc. Hell, they could have had this running on the desktop right now on top of consoles and maybe some netplay as well. Oh well..."

So why did Sega go with Unity instead of RetroArch? "About 90 per cent of the games so far are in Unity," Sega Networks' chief marketing officer Mike Evans explained in an interview with GamesIndustry. "The reason we chose Unity as middleware is it enables us to take this content to other platforms as well."

Or maybe it's because these kinds of ports are rushed out without any kind of QA to make as much money as possible.

No, the article specifically says unity.

@GameboyTroy: Just buy the Sega Mega Drive & Genesis classics collections on Steam. There are 5 volumes, but if you get them all it comes with all these games and a lot more. Even has a pretty cool in-game game shelf, with original box siding.

Probably be on sale later this afternoon too when summer sale starts.

Installed Phantasy Star 2 last night... decent port. But I think I will just end up paying the $2, free ad version is pretty crappy.

these are just the mobile games they already had on the market but they're making them free now with ad support and too be honest if I really wanted to play a sega game I would just emulate it.