Sega sold 13% more games and booked 23% less revenue

Hero image: Akonnchiroll, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Osaki Garden Tower in Tokyo, which houses Sega Sammy's headquarters.

Sega Sammy published its first-half results on November 6, and page 11 of the presentation holds two rows that disagree. Full game sales came to ¥20.5bn, down 23.5% from ¥26.8bn. Full game unit sales came to 10.6m copies, up 12.9% from 9.39m. Both figures cover April to September 2026. The same deck reports group operating income up 42%, and that is the number most coverage led with.

The two rows agree once one is divided by the other. Sega sold more copies at a lower average price, and the profit came from pachislot machines.

Two rows moving in opposite directions

April to September	2026	2025	Change
Full game sales	¥20.5bn	¥26.8bn	-23.5%
Full game units	10.6m	9.39m	+12.9%
Revenue per unit	¥1,934	¥2,854	-32.2%

The yen and unit figures are Sega's, taken from the Entertainment Contents section of the results presentation. The percentages and the last row are our arithmetic. Sega reports units in thousands, 10,600 and 9,390, which is where the 9.39m comes from.

Divide the money by the copies

20.5 ÷ 10.6 = 1.934, so ¥1,934 of revenue per copy. A year earlier, 26.8 ÷ 9.39 = 2.854, or ¥2,854.

The two percentage changes cannot move independently. Revenue is units multiplied by revenue per unit, so 1.129 × 0.678 = 0.765, and that product is the 23.5% fall in sales. A 13% rise in volume and a 32% fall in price have to land there. Nothing else is needed to explain the top line.

What the ratio does not describe is a price tag. It mixes full-price launches, discounted catalogue, regional pricing, digital and physical, and collector's editions into one number. The units are sell-in, copies Sega shipped to retailers and platforms rather than copies scanned at a till. Sega does not publish an average selling price, so ¥1,934 is the average revenue per copy across the whole slate for six months and nothing narrower.

99% of the copies were catalogue titles

Sega splits the line in two on the same page. New titles brought in ¥0.3bn from 80,000 units. Catalogue titles, which the appendix defines as anything released in the previous fiscal year or earlier, brought in ¥20.2bn from 10.52m units. A year earlier the split was ¥8.7bn from 1.81m new-title units and ¥18.0bn from 7.58m catalogue units.

Catalogue went from 80.7% of unit sales to 99.2%. The new-title line fell 96.6% in revenue and 95.6% in units, which is what six months without a major release looks like. Sega's own slide for the period lists Football Manager 27, Stranger Than Heaven and Persona 4 Revival as coming from Q3 onward, so the first half carried no launch of that size.

Mix explains part of the per-copy decline. It does not explain all of it. Catalogue revenue per copy fell from ¥2,375 to ¥1,920, or 19.1%, which means the older games also earned less each. New titles averaged ¥3,750 per copy against ¥4,807 a year earlier.

Sega describes the catalogue performance as steady and credits "continued promotional activities based on 'sales transformation'" on page 12. The company does not use the word discount, and it publishes no price data that would separate a planned price cut from a shift toward cheaper markets and editions. The 19% decline in revenue per catalogue copy is consistent with deeper discounting. It is not proof of it.

The 42% came from pachislot

Group operating income rose from ¥10.0bn to ¥14.2bn. The segment table on page 4 shows where that came from.

First-half operating income	2026	2025	Change
Entertainment Contents	¥9.3bn	¥15.9bn	-41.5%
Pachislot and Pachinko Machines	¥14.5bn	¥3.0bn	+383%
Gaming	-¥3.9bn	-¥3.0bn	-¥0.9bn
Other and elimination	-¥5.7bn	-¥5.9bn	+¥0.2bn
Group	¥14.2bn	¥10.0bn	+42.0%

The four segment lines add up to the group figure in both years, which is a useful check on the table: 9.3 + 14.5 - 3.9 - 5.7 = 14.2, and 15.9 + 3.0 - 3.0 - 5.9 = 10.0.

Inside Entertainment Contents, sales fell 2.4% to ¥145.1bn and operating income fell 41.5%. The Consumer sub-segment, where full games sit, did worse than the division as a whole: operating income of ¥1.6bn against ¥9.7bn, down 83.5%.

The company's summary slide says results "exceeded expectations across all segments". That compares each division against Sega's own plan for the half, not against the year before, so both statements can hold: Entertainment Contents beat its internal target and still earned 41.5% less than it did a year earlier.

Some outlets put the pachislot and pachinko gain at 331.6%. The presentation's rounded segment figures, ¥3.0bn to ¥14.5bn, work out to a larger multiple, and we could not reconcile the two numbers, so this article uses the yen figures rather than the percentage.

This is the opposite of the pattern in our Nintendo and Sony comparison from the same reporting week, where the gap ran between two companies. Here it runs between two lines of one table.

What the second half has to do

Sega left its full-year forecast unchanged: ¥95.3bn of full game sales on 25.06m units. Subtract the first half and the remaining six months need ¥74.8bn from 14.46m copies, or ¥5,173 per copy.

That is 2.67 times the first-half average. The plan depends on the Q3 and Q4 slate selling at close to full price, which is possible with three named releases in four months and impossible on the first half's catalogue mix.

One correction to the coverage: these are six-month figures. At least one summary circulated the ¥20.5bn and 10.6m as three months ended September 30, which the company's own "Thru Q2" column does not support.

The remaining differences between sources are rounding. Sega's deck puts group sales at ¥212.5bn and one outlet wrote ¥212.6bn. Group operating income appears as 42% in one place and 42.2% in another, because ¥14.2bn is itself rounded. None of that changes the direction of any number above. The figure that carries the story, revenue per copy, is not published by the company at all.

The next check is the December quarter, when the new-title line has to stop being ¥0.3bn.