Opinionated - SEGA Used To Nurture Talent, It's Time To Do It Again.

One of the most special aspects of SEGA, throughout the companies history is the wealth of talent, across their games, Sonic, Yakuza, Virtua Fighter, Outrun, Shenmue, Panzer Dragoon, Ristar, and much more, which as birthed generations of talent that have gone on to create their own legacy. For example, Tetsuya Mizuguchi. Mizuguchi was a employee of SEGA from 1990 to 2003, and was the head of one of SEGA’s most experimental studios, Untitled Game Artists, which were behind titles like Rez and Space Channel 5. Once the studio closed and merged with Sonic Team in 2003, Mizuguchi left SEGA and created his own studio with another employee, Q Entertainment. Q Entertainment would create a few titles, like Lumines, Meteos, Every Extend Extra, Ninety-Nine Nights, Child Of Eden and more. He would later leave Q Entertainment and founded Enhance, which would create Tetris Effect.

This is one of many examples, but you get the idea. Now, imagine that idea of nurturing talent with the ability to back them and publish their games, sound great right? Well, it’s not a new business model, as EA does that, with EA Originals.

EA Originals is a program to help fund and advertise smaller, independent titles from studios, with all of the profit going back to said studios. It’s one of the more developer friendly schemes in the industry. This has led EA to develop working relationships with several studios like Coldwood, Zoink, Jo-Mei, Final DStrike Games, Ascendant Studios, Surgent Studios and Hazelight. This has resulted in titles like It Takes Two, Unravel, A Way Out, Sea Of Solitude, Fe, Lost In Random and more. This program allows EA to support indie studios with complete creative freedom while also having a diverse portfolio of titles compared to their usual racing, shooting, football…ing titles. It’s also been a program that has brought a wealth good PR for EA. Out of the 11 titles released, 6 titles have been nominated for awards, 5 titles won awards, and It Takes Two won Game Of The Year in 2021.

It’s a business move that works, supports indie studios, provides you good PR, and helps diversify your game portfolio, and I think SEGA should take it on board. Imagine this…

Penny’s Big Breakaway, developed by Evening Star, published by SEGA, with a physical copy at launch. Now imagine that for Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, then Freedom Planet…I could keep going, but you get my point. A SEGA Originals program would allow indie studios to receive funding for their titles, and SEGA would be able to publish and show off titles that help diversify their line-up. Especially their line-up, that's the key point. I say this as SEGA has had a problem that many don’t talk about, sand that’s genre absence.

For a while, SEGA has leaned more into a focus on a few genres. Platformers, JRPG, Rhythm, Puzzle and Strategy. These genres have been the backbone of SEGA’S portfolio in recent years, but it’s led to a decline in other genres. For me, the biggest genres missing is Horror, Shooters and Racing. For many, SEGA was king when it came to racing games. Daytona, Virtua Racing, SEGA Rally, Outrun, and more, yet in the past few years, the only game we’ve had in the racing genre was Team Sonic Racing in 2019 by Sumo Digital. The last horror title was by Creative Assembly with Alien Isolation in 2014. The last shooting title was Border Break in 2018 for Japan only. These are significant gaps in releases for important genres that I feel SEGA needs to address, as it’d diversify their portfolio and line-up, reaching more audiences, and that is where a SEGA Originals program would help benefit them.

SEGA could publish and fund titles in these genres and other genres to help spread out their reach evenly to maximise an audience. Since this platform would be for indie titles, SEGA would be able to look out for more creative and inspired twists on those genres, imagine SEGA publishing a title like ULTRAKILL for example.

There was talk recently of a Sonic Fanverse type idea, hire fans to make Sonic titles to sell on storefronts, and while on paper, that is a nice idea, I feel SEGA would be better off working with professional studios and help them realize their ideas, as they are in a more urgent position to get funding and support from publishers, but that’s a topic for another day. Personally, while licensing out their IP’s to indie studios or getting independent developers to work on Sonic is good, it’s only a start, and I think SEGA can do much more here, and I believe taking a page out of EA’s book could prove to be a highly beneficial source of goodwill from indie developers and the public. It’d also help fill out gaps in software releases and can help diversity their portfolio to be much more far reaching beyond die-hard SEGA fans. At the very least, I hope SEGA IP’s that have been licensed out can behind to be published by SEGA themselves while being developed freely and independently, which with the reveals of Streets Of Rage Revolution, Shinobi and Golden Axe, is something more possible now. 

Thank you all for giving this opinion piece a read, and see you all soon, bye!