Back in June 2017, SEGA announced its SEGA Forever initiative to bring its classic games to iOS and Android as free to start games with a no ads IAP. Each game was to be adapted for mobile while remaining faithful to the originals. We saw the service launch with five games with more coming every few weeks. As recently as this week, select SEGA Forever games have been delisted on iOS and Android. Shaun has most of them installed and spotted some of them getting updates recently with new notifications in-game alerting users that the support for the specific game has ended, with a link to find more info on other platforms to play it on. Currently, that link opens SEGA’s home page. Check out the warning screenshot from Shaun below:
SEGA Forever games launched with cloud saves, controller support, and more. Shaun’s covered many of them over the years, but it seems like the program is currently on hold or over. SEGA is yet to announce anything, but if we do get any official news around it, we will post about it. If you missed the original launch, watch the unlisted trailer for it below:
As of now, it is unclear when many of these were delisted, but some were done as recently as this week. The delisted games are: Comix Zone, Altered Beast, Phantasy Star Classics, Revenge of Shinobi, Vectorman, Decap Attack, Eswat, Ristar, Space Harrier 2, Beyond Oasis, Gunstar Heroes, Dynamite Headdy, and After Burner Climax. There are still some games available to play and buy if you didn’t own them before, but the ones above have been delisted. It is unclear if they will return. Check out the official SEGA Forever website here. Did you play any of the delisted games before and what would you like to see SEGA bring to the his program if they are continuing it?
A shame, but not a shock. The Forever line was always seemingly doomed… paying for ad removal didn’t fully remove ads and bafflingly some features always required only access even after paying. They also immediately gained a lot of bad will by adding the Sonic remasters under the Forever banner, breaking functionality multiple times in the process.
Beyond that the phone format just wasn’t a good fit for a lot of these. I don’t think they even released all the games they initially promised? Seemed like as soon as they realized there was a severe lack of interest the entire initiative was abandoned.
Sad to see more things delisted instead of updated properly and maintained, but that just seems to be the state of things where these big companies are concerned. Square has just as many issues here. Makes it hard to buy anything in mobile app stores… you just never know what experience you’ll get
Yeah I paid for Phantasy Star series, went to play it....gives me a warnining screen and then closes the launcher. How the F am I supposed to play the games I paid money for now?