FuririnP 🇺🇸DMP

A Japanese arcade operator who is losing business due to Sega's inept security and unacceptable comms of "we're working on it, wait some days for us to tell you that we're still working on it" responses lays out a dire situation. This should be an "all hands on deck" situation to get ALL.NET back up and running, but is it? Doesn't seem that way from Sega's own worthless statements about the problem. While I'm sure they can't have every employee at the company working on it, they could pull resources to make these games work with expanded features offline. If there are any other resources that could work on a solution, even a temporary backup one, then they should be doing that. Of course, it's easy to criticize from the backseat, but we can only form opinions based on what little facts there are. It's Sega's own fault that they have put arcades in this situation, and how they are handling it has equally poor economic consequences. There's a little known concept in business known as the "trust thermocline." Every business gets the benefit of the doubt from consumers, and as they put out good products/services, that increases the trust that people have in a brand. But the inverse is true too. Companies we've all grown up with have an enormous amount of goodwill and trust they've built up over the years, so that when they make mistakes, people are usually willing to overlook those. Until they become big mistakes where people are losing money and/or jobs, and the responses are pathetic attempts to "hope no one notices," or taking consumer loyalty for granted. One company you've probably heard of, Atari, once breached the trust thermocline by contributing to a saturated game market with with high-profile slop (we called it shovelware back then), teasing numerous games & hardware they never delivered on, and sponsoring a World Championship for $400k where the 3rd party organizer only paid out $50k, and disappeared, leaving Atari taking the brunt of the blame (as they also did not properly address the situation. What happened when people stopped trusting Atari? They stopped buying both their arcade and home games. The company went from generating billions to losing hundreds of millions, tanking the entire game market with it. While they weren't solely responsible for the problems that plagued the game market of the early '80s, they were a big driver of it, and the resulting damage caused thousands of arcade locations to close, and with that even more jobs lost. Even Sega ended up selling off to Bally/Midway for a time as the American market became too detrimental. While Atari survived(through multiple owners), it's taken them decades to repair that reputational damage that they inflicted on themselves. The longer this ALL.NET situation goes on, the deeper the damage goes for Sega. True, this is not a 1:1 situation with 1983, but if this triggers another mass round of arcade closures in Japan, then people there and here won't forget that it started with them, that they didn't seem to take fixing it seriously enough, and they'll vote with their wallets by giving business to a company who is worthy of that cash.