SEGA boss admits betraying loyal fans with poor games

He added, “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”.

“As far as the western market goes, we learned a lot from ATLUS”, Satomi discussed (translated by Siliconera). That saw the company move out of its United States office space commitments a few months ago too and cut back on development.

Since bowing out of the console race, the quality of Sega games have sharply declined, particularly in regards to their flagship franchise, Sonic the Hedgehog. The decision to hire Big Red Button Entertainment to make Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric was another one of those failures. He said, “Sega in the 1990s was known for its brand, but after that, we’ve lost trust, and we were left with nothing but reputation”.

Satomi also admitted that Sega’s slide into its current model has broken the trust of its fans. The Sega of the 2000’s has been nothing like the innovative Sega of the 1990’s, a proud company that put out extremely high quality and memorable titles and provided genuine competition for Nintendo at the time. Aside from the dodgy mobile ports of its retro games (which recently had to be taken off sale due to quality problems), Sega’s become known for its lousy one-Sonic-rehash-after-the-next attitude. “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”.

According to Satomi, Sega has been inspired to turn around their misfortunes and give fans what they want based on what they’ve seen from their subsidiary, Atlus. This is going way back to Sega’s glory days, back when they ruled the roost with the Genesis in the 16 bit days.

Should Satomi’s long-term plan come to fruition, all of this will culminate in Sega regaining its status as an industry brand, but that potential ascendancy hasn’t been without problems of its own.

There are so many awesome franchises Sega could bring back from the brink, as we have suggested before.