SEGA’s CEO and president Hajime Satomi recently sat down to speak to Weekly Famitsu about what they company have learned since acquiring ATLUS, and how they plan to drive their business moving forward.
“As far as the western market goes, we learned a lot from ATLUS,” Satomi discussed (translated by Siliconera). “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.”
The conversation moved on to the home console market, and where SEGA will place their focus to which he responded: “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.
He continues, “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.”
Having signalled such intent Famitsu asked whether we can expect a high quality release from SEGA later this year, to which Satomi added: “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.”
As to what we can look forward to in the future, he closed: “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.”
About 20 years too late