14 DAY TRIAL // SEGA will not be attending this year's edition of Gamescom that will take place in Köln between the 19th and 22nd of August. This means that games like Sonic the Hedgehog 4, Valkyria Chronicles, Vanquish or Shogun 2: Total War will not be seen on the showroom floor of the convention.
The company has issued a statement today to VG247, explaining why it made the decision to skip the German games convention this year. “Gamescom 2009 was a very successful show for us,” was revealed in the statement, “and continues to be the most important European event in the calendar. The decision not to show at this year’s event was not down to the location of Cologne and will not mean that Sega will never attend gamescom in the future, but simply a commercial decision made for 2010.”
This is most probably the fault of the rough financial year SEGA West is having. Earlier this year, it announced that around 13 percent of the company's total workforce would be laid off and that it would be focusing on digital distribution. With the spectacular Electronic Entertainment Expo having closed its gates, it is quite clear that another presence at a big conference would have been too expensive to handle by the publisher.
Creative Assembly's Shogun 2: Total War and Platinum Games' Vanquish are SEGA's most promising titles at the moment. A real time and turn based strategy hybrid, Shogun 2: Total War is supposed to go back to the roots of the series, offering a smaller but deeper scale for the fans. Vanquish is the take of Bayonetta's creators on the third person cover shooter genre that has been very popular in this generation of video game consoles. The idea is to create a much faster type of gameplay, rely on acrobatic moves and jet-pack fuel slides from cover to cover.