President of Sega Japan Eventually Realises Games Should Be Good

Games should be good. It’s quite the epiphany, right? Sadly, it may have occurred to Hajime Satomi, President of Sega, two decades too late. After the failure of it Dreamcast console, bankruptcy, and a shift into mobile gaming, Satomi has finally realised that the quality of its games should have been paramount, and the lack of which has contributed to the company’s downfall.

Speaking to Famitsu, Satomi said, “As far as the Western market goes, we learned a lot from Atlus [developer owned by Sega]. 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.”

He added, “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.”

It seems that Satomi can now acknowledge how Sega alienated the fanbase it worked so hard to accrue during the 1990s, conceding that “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.” He lamented, “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.”

Can Satomi and Sega put their money where their mouth is? We’ll find out soon, with Satomi assuring, “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 consoles at Tokyo Game Show.”

Thank you Forbes for providing us with this information.