For those that are not aware, Atlus (the company that Sato refers to) is a Sega-owned Japanese video game developer, best known for it’s Megami Tensei franchise.
Advertisement
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. Instead they insisted on releasing Sonic Boom and guess what, it failed pretty badly. However, Satomi attempted to address concerns in a recent interview with Famitsu after acknowledging their past mistakes. 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. This is going way back to Sega‘s glory days, back when they ruled the roost with the Genesis in the 16 bit days.
Time will tell if Sega will live up to their promise of returning attention to the dedicated fans that have turned away in recent years, and start putting out high quality games like the ones that defined the company in the early 90’s.
Despite Satomi’s admittance of Sega’s poor performance for the last decade or so and his insistence that he will rebuild confidence in the Sega name, Sega has made some questionable decisions very recently as well.
“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”, Satomi said. ” “For this reason, we’d like to win back the customers” trust, and become a ‘brand, ‘ once again”, Satomi said.
We did our best to build a relationship of mutual trust with older fans of Sega but, looking back, there have been some titles that have partially betrayed that [trust] in the past 10 years. Chronic mismanagement would mean that they would lose their penchant for quality, and come to be known as a chaotic, schizophrenic company capable of good products, but always hampered by its management.
Advertisement
The CEO of Sega is aware of the fact that the company is left with nothing but just reputation and no trust from customers.
