AtGames, Tec Toy and other (un)licensed consoles and games

[omonim2007]

Colleagues, greetings.

I would like to raise for discussion (although everything seemed very obvious to me for years) the issue of licensing games on supposedly licensed Sega Mega Drive consoles. Why are the consoles "supposedly" licensed? Because for some reason, consoles like Sega Gopher or Mega Drive 4 or various variations of AtGames consoles and many others are considered licensed products of Sega.

Recently, I have had to make numerous edits (or return values back to their original state) to the SMD dat, so I want to come to a consensus and prevent future edit wars between datters.

Further, I will proceed from the fact that there are two concepts in terms of licensing: a licensed console and a licensed game. A licensed console can be produced either by the company-licensee itself or by other manufacturers during the system's life cycle, or by other manufacturers after the end of the system's life cycle. A licensed game is a game that has received such status from the copyright holder (licensee) of the system (in our case, it is the Sega company). That is, any game that was released after the official end of system support is not a licensed product.

The Brazilian company Tec Toy is famous for the fact that it continues to this day to produce supposedly licensed consoles and supplies them with supposedly licensed games. But can these consoles and games be considered licensed after the official end of sales worldwide? I believe that they cannot, since in this case Tec Toy is more likely to play on the feelings of gamers and wishful thinking.

Officially, worldwide support for Sega Mega Drive consoles was discontinued in 1997, while the Majesco sold official versions of the consoles for several more years until 1999. I propose to consider the year 2000 as the starting date of the official end of the life cycle of SMD consoles. Accordingly, all games released in 2000 and later should not have licensed status, and should also have “Aftermarket” status.

Please take a look at the list of the company's licensed games on this page: https://segaretro.org/TecToy. All other games released after 1998 must have "Unlicensed" and "Aftermarket" status in the dat.

As for games like "Bomber", "Academia do Saber", "Corrida de Tampinhas" and others which were released only in digital form must also be considered Unlicensed and Aftermarket ones. Another fact why such games should not be considered licensed is that they are available on modern consoles only as bonus games in the internal memory or on SD cards.

P.S. I will return all such modern games to the status of Unlicensed and Aftermarket until a different decision is collectively made.

[Hiccup]

Recently, I have had to make numerous edits (or return values back to their original state) to the SMD dat, so I want to come to a consensus and prevent future edit wars between datters.

P.S. I will return all such modern games to the status of Unlicensed and Aftermarket until a different decision is collectively made.

Apologies for the aside, but its probably a good idea to wait for anyone to reply to this thread, before reverting things. Especially if you want to avoid an edit war.

[KingMike]

Even something like Monster World IV English, that Sega themselves made?

But can these consoles and games be considered licensed after the official end of sales worldwide?

If Sega was still giving TecToy authorization to keep making new games, then yes.
If TecToy was allowed to keep making consoles that were authorized by Sega then it wasn't "the official end of sales worldwide". It was after what the end of sales IN MOST REGIONS OF THE WORLD.
Although at some point even TecToy stopped making new original consoles (that could play cartridges) and was making plug-n-play consoles (that could only play the games included on the device).

There's just never going to be a definitive answer, there will always be something that challenges the line of a definition of "licensed".
If Wii U discs were covered here, we'd have to argue Breath of the Wild is an Aftermarket game because it was released four months after Wii U console production ended, and I don't think many people would be happy to see a major first-party franchise title get that label.

[Arctic Circle System]

It seems I have missed this thread. I really need to check the forums more often. Anyway, for TecToy, I think it's pretty cut and dry. Games licensed and/or published by TecToy in Brazil aren't unlicensed because they are the licensor in Brazil as part of agreements made between them and SEGA. With AtGames, it's a bit more murky as we don't know as much about the details of the arrangement between AtGames and SEGA. However, I think it's safer to say that SEGA most likely gave them the green light to put the bonus games on their systems. It should also be noted that many of the bonus games AtGames put on their systems are simply translated versions of games previously released by TecToy and Devworks, the latter being closely affiliated with TecToy.

[bikerspade]

At minimum, I think these AtGames clone console entries should probably have an additional tag?"

DoM tickets for Bomber (USA) and Bomber (Europe):
https://datomatic.no-intro.org/?page=fo ... hread=4004
https://datomatic.no-intro.org/?page=fo ... hread=4005

[Arctic Circle System]

At minimum, I think these AtGames clone console entries should probably have an additional tag, just like Star Fox 2 does on SNES:
"Star Fox 2 (USA, Europe) (Classic Mini, Switch Online, Nintendo Leak)"

Probably a good idea. Didn't think about that at the time.

[rarenight]

At minimum, I think these AtGames clone console entries should probably have an additional tag, just like Star Fox 2 does on SNES:
"Star Fox 2 (USA, Europe) (Classic Mini, Switch Online, Nintendo Leak)"

DoM tickets for Bomber (USA) and Bomber (Europe):
https://datomatic.no-intro.org/?page=fo ... hread=4004
https://datomatic.no-intro.org/?page=fo ... hread=4005

Good idea, I added the Sega Gopher and Sega Reactor qualifier tags to those two entries.

[KingMike]

At minimum, I think these AtGames clone console entries should probably have an additional tag, just like Star Fox 2 does on SNES:
"Star Fox 2 (USA, Europe) (Classic Mini, Switch Online, Nintendo Leak)"

Probably a good idea. Didn't think about that at the time.

I don't know if it's the best idea to specifically tag stuff found through illegitimate means.