In this week’s issue of Famitsu, SEGA CEO and President, Hajime Satomi, says that the company has “learned a lot from Atlus”, and speaks about how SEGA is pushing the idea of quality.
Satomi stated during the discussion:
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
Famitsu ends the conversation with Satomi by asking what fans could look forward to in the future.
“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.”
In a side note, Sonic the Hedgehog’s PR and social media manager Aaron Webber told SEGAbits that “there’s definitely stuff in the works” when asked about the celebration of Sonic’s 25th anniversary. It seems like SEGA intends to share some information regarding this topic early next year.