SEGA on Quality, a TGS Announcement, and Sonic’s 25th

July 7, 2015
Category: Games
Written by: Cart Boy
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Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric — Image: sonic.wikia.com

SEGA’s President and CEO, Hajime Satomi, recently sat down with Famitsu for an interview. Siliconera has a translation of their conversation, and it’s worth a read. There’s one nugget in particular that caught my attention.

“I’ve been talking to the employees about how we should start putting serious consideration into quality from this point on,” responds Satomi. “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 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.”

Interesting. Satomi adds that Atlus taught them about the Western market, and he believes it’s likely that SEGA will have something to announce at the upcoming Tokyo Game Show. No hints as to what we can expect, but Satomi hopes to start winning back his consumers’ trust. This is nice to hear, and I hope they follow through with it.

Also, I’d like to voice my desire to see re-releases of the first two Shenmue games. After all, the third one was successfully funded, and I never got to play the first two. Shenmue is topical at the moment, so make me happy, SEGA.

Image: themonitordaily.com

By the way, are you expecting to see a Sonic game announced this September? Aaron Webber, the PR and Social Media Manager for SEGA’s iconic hedgehog, recently partook in an interview with SEGABits. Webber mentioned that there’s “definitely stuff in the works” for the 25th anniversary, and we’ll likely hear about that stuff early next year.

I have to admit, I’m really curious to see where Sonic Team decides to go with their next endeavor. Will they try to refine Sonic Lost World‘s formula? Will they return to the boost gameplay that defined Sonic Unleashed, Colors, and Generations? Will they do something new? For now, at least we have the 25th anniversary’s logo.