Those crazy Sega kids, eh? I bet they just don’t know what they’re going to do next.

What comes around, well, it goes around.

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There are several things that are surprising about the recent big ugly confused mess that’s come spewing out of Sega’s many corporate gobs.

One, of course, is that they’ve finally started listening to me – I told them to give up on hardware and start making games for other people’s consoles in this very column way back in June 1998. (Check out www.worldofstuart.co.uk for the proof if you don’t believe me.)

But the other inexplicable thing is: Why now?

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Because after a whole bunch of false dawns, it looked like just maybe the DC had managed to scrape itself a fighting chance, if not of beating the PS2, Xbox et al, then at least of carving out a decent niche in which to survive.

Everyone and his dog was falling over themselves at Christmas to proclaim that the DC had far and away the best software lineup of any console, and that looks likely to stay true for at least the next 12 months. And the pre-Xmas sales figures showed the DC taking the No.1 position for the first time.

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It wasn’t all that rosy, of course – in 2000 overall, the DC was still outsold around 3:1 by the PS1, and its best-selling game of the year (Crazy Taxi) shifted less than 100,000 copies.

But the facts were that towards the end of last year, even allowing for the traditional Christmas boom, the DC was selling better than it ever had done. Shenmue outsold every PS2 game, despite PS2 owners being desperate to buy anything half-decent. (And thanks to the launch hype, PS2 only sold 50,000 fewer consoles than the DC in 2000.)

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Of course, Sega’s main problem was its lack of advertising budget. Jet Set Radio, every bit as good as Shenmue but much less promoted, sold only a fifth as many copies - under 20,000, in fact.

(Of course, if Sega had troubled to read this column in June 1999, they’d have been warned against wasting their entire ad budget uselessly sponsoring a bunch of win-nothing football teams.)

But game sales like those of Shenmue would have finally generated money for ads, and ads sell still more games.

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But the truth is that while Sega had more or less managed to weather the storm with the DC, the company’s backers/management have simply lost the stomach for the battle and given up.