The president of Sega has finally learned the obvious from watching Atlus: If you make a quality game, it will sell well.
Remember Sega? Back in the 90’s, with its home consoles and multiple million-dollar IPs, Sega was one of the big boys. Now, it has essentially faded to obscurity: it no longer produces consoles, it has licensed its most cherished characters to former rival Nintendo, and has produced only disappointment after disappointment. In fact, it’s found substantially more success in the third party titles it has published, from the likes of Creative Assembly and Atlus. Looking back, Sega president Hajime Satomi muses that if Sega follows in Atlus’s footsteps and makes good, quality games, then perhaps people would actually like them.
“As far as the Western market goes, we learned a lot from Atlus. If we can make a title with proper quality, I believe there’s a good chance for it to do well even in the West for players that like to play Japanese games.” Satomi told Famitsu.
“I’ve been talking to the employees about how we should start putting serious consideration into quality from this point on. Especially in North America and Europe, where it’s always been more of a focus on schedules, I believe that if we can’t maintain quality, it would be better to not release anything at all.”
To put it quite bluntly: no shit! I think the industry has proven time and time again that releasing a shoddy, unfinished product doesn’t exactly go over too well with your fan base.
Satomi also admits that he “betrayed the tust” of his most loyal fans when he took over the company and began throwing Sonic‘s face onto as many things as possible. “We did our best to build a relationship of mutual trust with older fans of Sega, but looking back, there have been some titles that have partially betrayed that trust in the past 10 years.”
“Sega in the ’90s was known for its brand, but after that, we’ve lost trust and we were left with nothing but reputation. For this reason, we’d like to win back the customers’ trust and become a brand once again.”
Satomi finished by teasing a special announcement from the company for this year’s Tokyo Game Show, taking place in September.
Source: Forbes
