Sega president, and COO of Sega Sammy Holdings, Haruki Satomi, sat down for an
interview with CNBC to discuss about their future projects for the company, as well as their plans for
Sonic the Hedgehog and how everything's worked out so far.
Sonic the Hedgehog is still Sega's most beloved character but it is no secret to anyone that the franchise has struggled to please fans in the past. Most of this has to do with that the quality of the games that Sega have been putting out over the years, which has been pretty inconsistent, to put it nicely.
Regarding Sonic, Satomi remembers that when they released a sonic game some years ago "
the reception was very bad, there was a site called Metacritic that aggregates the critics and scores games from 1-100, and at that time the Sonic game got 30 out of 100," which made him feel like he had disappointed the fans.
Because of that game, which is very likely to be
Sonic the Hedgehog(2006), he promised himself that disappointing fans and releasing bad games would never happen again now that he was in charge of the company.
"
So after I took the lead it will never happen again and I told our development team or even sales team that we should not release a game unless we 100 percent agree with and are confident of the quality."
He also mentions that, in order to make Sega successful again, they are listening to fans and trying to take their requests and feedback into account.
"
Sega is very known company, many people on the website emails or Facebook messages asking me to make this kind of game, or please bring back this title again, or please improve the quality of this title again, so I try to answer those questions and requests."
Satomi has been in charge of the company since 2004 and, since then, Sonic games have still been somewhat divisive. The most recent case is
Sonic Forces, launched in November 2017, which got very mixed to negative reviews from critics and fans alike. But last year also saw the blue hedgehog's best game to date,
Sonic Mania, which got a lot of praise for its graphics(that harkened back to the 16 bit era), level design, and over-all gameply mechanics.
On whether Sonic is finally going to make a successful comeback, Mr. Satomi says that "
One of the answers I gave[in regards to fans asking about Sonic's big comeback] was the latest two titles which we launched last year, Sonic Mania and Sonic Forces, especially Sonic Mania which got a 80s, 85ish Meta-critic score and fans are excited about this game and people really love it."
The success of Sonic Mania has definitely increased sales, which has led to Sega making an animated Sonic Mania series, and there's even a Sonic movie on the way.
"We recently announced the new partnership with Paramount for a Sonic movie project that's going to be available November 15th to December 19th so it's a little more than one year but it's coming soon and we're really excited about it. We can bring Sonic to the next level and not only bring the Sonic game to existing fans but we try to grow our fan base worldwide."
Strictly talking about other Sega IPs, Mr. Satomi cooments that they are planning to release more than 10 games this year. All of these usually come out for Japan and Asia but Mr. Satomi mentions that he wants to hit the global market, as well, and for that they are releasing them in the West as soon as they possibly can.
We recently have been seeing some of this globalisation that Mr. Satomi mentions.
Yakuza Kiwami 2 and
Yakuza 6: The Song of Life have already been localised and almost in record time, so we should expect to see more titles from Sega coming to the West, as well.
Haruki Satomi seems to know exactly what is that can make the company grow, and is nice to see that they are taking their time to develop quality games while, at the same time, listening to requests and feedback from fans, so we really hope they end up delivering all the goods that they've promised.