Sega CEO Admits Company ‘Betrayed’ Fans, Will Try to Fix Things

After quite a few lackluster performances by the Blue Blur, Sega's CEO admits his company has a lot to learn and intends to rebuild the fan's faith in them.

Siliconera reports that Sega CEO and President Hajime Satomi had some choice words while speaking with Famitsu about his company's current relationship with its fans based on its recent titles and admits that his team learned a lot from Atlus after acquiring them two years ago. In terms of home consoles, Satomi knows that the PlayStation 4 is making a killing on the market, especially in Japan. Beyond that, the PS4 has had a record-breaking amount of success worldwide. Yakuza Zero recently launched for both PS4 and PS3, and Satomi noted that it was doing quite well in both China and Japan.

“As far as the Western market goes, we learned a lot from Atlus,” Satomi said. “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.”

Surprise, Satomi-san — we like to play good games, regardless of how "Japanese" they are.

“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. 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.”

One of those biggest failures, Satomi, would have to be putting Valkyria Chronicles' sequel on the PSP and not on consoles. The decision to hire Big Red Button Entertainment to make Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric was another one of those failures. We get that putting a game on PSP or hiring a newly found studio as opposed to an experienced one is cheaper, but the quality and success of your product depends on what you want to invest in them.

“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.”

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