Sega of Japan's Twisted Logic

Earlier today, I was reading the continuing complaint-fest over at the official Sega PSU forums when a thought came to me about the company's handling of the US/EU game.

Through the first few rounds of Phantasy Star Online, Sega elected to put players from the United States, Europe, and Japan together on the same servers. They added features like Word Select to enable players to interact with one another, regardless of language spoken. And for three versions of the game, all seemed well.

Sometime between PSOv3 and PSO:Blue Burst, something must have happened over at Sega. Instead of putting all players worldwide on a single set of servers, the company decided to separate the Western players from the Japanese by staggering the release of the game several months and giving them their own servers to play in.

This release model was repeated in Phantasy Star Universe and PSU:Ambition of the Illuminus, and will most likely be repeated in future Phantasy Star online titles as well. But why?

I've long believed that Sega of Japan's primary goal in segregating the US/EU and Japanese players was to keep the US/EU population from hacking the game to bits (this was popular on the worldwide PSO releases) and thus (allegedly) ruining the game for Japanese players.

That's fine with me if the service and support is equal for both versions of the game. But this is not the case for PSU. And it's defeating the purpose of Sega's decision to separate the servers in the first place.

Lately, the lack of updates on the US/EU side of the game has been pushing more and more people to import a copy of Japanese PSU and jump into their servers. Apparently it's gotten pretty easy to do nowadays -- if you've got a valid credit card in the States or Europe you can register an account.

I don't get that at all. I thought Sega of Japan wanted to keep the US/EU players off their servers, but by running the Western version of the game so poorly, it's like they're inviting us to come play with the Japanese. It's nonsense, and raises the question of why they're even keeping the servers separate at all. Even the XBox 360 servers are US/EU/JP -- so what's the big deal?

This is a business decision that the US/EU players will probably never be able to figure out for sure. But if Sega of Japan doesn't take steps to improve the service in the West, it's a decision that will backfire on them in a big way.