Packaged software driving profits in Sega's games division

Sega's games division witnessed an increase in operating profits for the full-year, even though it launched fewer new titles than expected. 

According to Sega's financials for the year ended March 31, 2018, company-wide sales fell by 11.8 percent year-over-year to 323.6 billion yen ($2.9 billion), while operating profits dropped by 40 percent to 17.7 billion yen ($161.9 million). 

Despite that overall decline, operating profits in the games division rose by 32.8 percent to 14.8 billion yen ($135 million). Sales stayed largely flat, rising by 1.2 percent year-over-year to 208.1 billion yen ($1.9 billion). 

Sega seemed pleased with the performance of its packaged software roster, name-dropping a number of titles including Sonic Mania, Sonic Forces, and Persona 5 -- the latter of which sold 2 million copies throughout the fiscal year. 

Overall, packaged game sales totaled 17.33 million units for the year, with those numbers boosted by the performances of catalog titles. That's a notable increase on the 10.28 million copies the Japanese outfit managed to sell the previous year. 

Moving forward, Sega reiterated its desire to increase profitability by creating "higher-quality content" for mobile platforms, but explained that doing so will result in longer development times and higher operating costs. 

It also expects the retail game market to expand thanks to the penetration of home console hardware, and intends to capitalize on that growth by "strengthening the global development of domestic titles" while creating new properties and continuing to push catalog sales. 

If all goes to plan, Sega expects its games division to pull in sales of 390 billion yen ($3.57 billion and profits of 13.5 billion yen ($123.5 million) when the next fiscal year ends on March 31, 2019.