The CEO and President of SEGA, Hajime Satomi, has admitted in an interview with Japanese magazine Famitsu that he feels the company has “betrayed” the trust of their fans with several titles released, and how the focus of the company will now shift to quality releases to “win back the customers’ trust”.
Here is what he said in the interview:
“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.”
“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.”
Satomi follows by admitting the company has “partially betrayed” their older fans with select games.
“We did our best to build a relationship of mutual trust with older fans of Sega, but looking back, there’ve been some titles that have partially betrayed that [trust] in the past 10 years.”
Satomi could of course be partially referring the recently Sonic Boom and past bad Sega games like Sonic 06.
It’s not all doom and despair though, as Satomi says there could be a new home console game announced at the Tokyo Game Show 2015, which is in September. Could it be Sonic 25th anniversary title? He responds to Famitsu with a closing statement.
“Since we’re seriously considering quality, I can’t make that promise for the time being, but I believe we will announce something for home console at Tokyo Game Show,”
“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.”
How do you feel about the comments made by SEGA’s CEO? Do you agree with him?
The CEO and President of SEGA, Hajime Satomi, has admitted in an interview with Japanese magazine Famitsu that he feels the company has “betrayed” the trust of their fans with several titles released, and how the focus of the company will now shift to quality releases to “win back the customers’ trust”.
Here is what he said in the interview:
Satomi follows by admitting the company has “partially betrayed” their older fans with select games.
How do you feel about the comments made by SEGA’s CEO? Do you agree with him?