Topic: Seriously, what's up with SEGA and their (Sonic) Steam releases?

Is it just me or are SEGA's PC releases always a hot mess?
OK, let me clarify, I'm specifically talking about Sonic titles on Steam. Every single one I've tried to play so far has given me nothing but trouble.

Let's start with SEGA Genesis & Mega Drive Classics. This is their emulator for Mega Drive games that are bought on Steam. I have all the Sonic games on Steam from Humble Bundle, so I wanted to play the Mega Drive ones, but the emulator didn't work. Only after a ton of messing around with graphical settings did I get it to work, but with a framerate of about 5 fps, which is unacceptable on my laptop (a brand new MSI gaming laptop!). After some more fiddling I did finally get it to work properly, and now it runs fine.

Then came Sonic Adventure 2, a port of a game from 2001! I got this game before I got the Humble Bundle, so I didn't get the Battle DLC with it. And guess what? It didn't work! It would again keep crashing on startup! More fiddling around with graphical settings, but no matter what I tried it just wouldn't work. I did finally get it to work recently, and I don't know whether that was thanks to the Battle DLC or not, but I did read something about that at least, and if that's the case, that's truly shameful. (EDIT: I remember now, it wasn't the DLC, it was a seperate .exe file that I had to download to replace the original one I got from Steam. Still very shameful that a fan mod is required to get the game to function, but at least it's better than locking functionality behind a paywall).

And now today I wanted to play Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed. Take a wild guess what happened. Crash! Of course! Looking into solutions for it now, but I just wanted to ask around whether I'm the only one experiencing this.
It's not like my PC can't handle these games, especially since we're talking about an emulator and a port of a game from 2001 here, while I recently played Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance on high graphical settings without any issues whatshowever! I feel like SEGA is being completely careless with their releases on PC. OK, maybe that shouldn't come as a huge shock when you look at how Sonic's been treated in recent years with his newer releases, but still. Has anyone else had the same experience?

EDIT: OK, I got Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed to work by increasing the resolution to 1920*1080 (my screen resolution), but my point still stands. Just because the DEFAULT resolution is too low doesn't mean the game should just crash without any notification as to why!

Ive also got the humble bundle and had no trouble with the games(except for the classic sonic games which lagged a fair bit if you didn't use the simple launcher because somehow the 3d room is really resource demanding). I have played sonic racing transformed, sonic 1 2 and 3 and both sonic adventure 1 and 2.

It's not that your PC can't handle the games, it's that the games can't handle the PC. They were all designed to run on older hardware and operating systems

@shaneoh That may make some sense, since I've had compatibility issues with older titles before. However, these releases and re-releases are pretty recent, especially in the case of Sonic & All Stars Racing Transformed, which probably released just 1-2 years before my laptop (though to be fair, after changing the resolution that did work fine), and I think that compatibility with newer hardware should be taken in consideration when (re-)releasing a title. Releasing them with the excuse of it being designed for older hardware is like re-releasing the original Windows 95 port of DOOM on Steam without any compatibility changes. Of course that won't work, and that's precisely why I think SEGA should put more effort in getting them to work. Even if my PC is above average, that still doesn't excuse huge compatibility issues. Hell, I didn't even get Sonic Adventure 2 to work at all without downloading an external mod. If that's a requirement to play the game, then in my opinion something's wrong.

And even then, I know I'm not the only one to have these issues, and I know my PC isn't the only issue. I read about someone with a much older, but still pretty decent PC (which I believe was running Windows XP and met the given requirements to play the game) wanting to play Sonic Adventure 2, and it didn't work for him either. So at least in that case compatibility with newer hardware clearly isn't the issue.

Yeah, you're definitely right on that. The community is often what saves a broken game from becoming unplayable. Just look at the Steam port of Devil May Cry 3 for that. I haven't played it yet, but from what I heard it's an awful port. But I have heard of a fan mod that fixes all the issues and essentially turns it into the original PS2 version. They also helped me out with Sonic Adventure 2 in the same way.

@DarthNocturnal Yeah, OK, you're right. Maybe I overreacted a little bit in my original post after seeing that Racing Transformed ALSO crashed. After reading some of the reviews for DMC3, I guess I can't fault SEGA exclusively for this. I didn't know about those out-of-nowhere updates. I can actually really appreciate that. Of course I'd be better if it worked from launch, but hey, it's good to know they at least actknowledge and attempt to fix their mistakes (hell, they even attempted it with Sonic Boom, and I definitely applaud them for that). It's just something that bothered me and I mainly saw from SEGA, partially because of my huge backlog of Steam Sonic games. These compatibility issues still really bother me, and I definitely still believe publishers should put more care into compatibility and functionality of PC ports, but I guess SEGA isn't the only one to blame here.

Okay, so it's not Steam but it is really old Sega PC ports (and if they are on Steam, hopefully they'd have patched them first )

I recall the Sonic 3 & Knuckles port was broken in that the framerate limitation was turned off in window mode and turned on in full-screen mode, with no option to change that. So window mode was basically unplayable beyond the Pentium 1s it was designed for.

And for full-screen mode, it's been so long since I played I can't recall how playable that was due to either widescreen monitors replacing the 4:3s it was designed for, as well as I think the low-res mode it used becoming "obsolete" by newer video cards (I know the "Sega Smash Pack" Genesis compilations suffered from that).

Luckily years I found somewhere that someone discovered some secret options that could be written to the config file to manually change that.