Sega president Shuji Utsumi has been speaking on Chris Dring's The Game Business Show, and has claimed that "reviving Sega will be the greatest achievement in my career."
Utsumi is Sega's president and COO, as well as CEO of SEGA of America and SEGA Europe, so it's fair to say that his influence over the Japanese giant is pretty unmatched right now. He also helped launch the PlayStation and Dreamcast, so he has plenty of industry experience.
Speaking to Dring from Sega's Burbank offices, Utsumi explained that he wants to "revive that Sega spirit" that made the company so famous during the '90s:
"I’d really like to revive that Sega spirit. Sometime around 2000, even around the 1980s, we were regarded as a very cultural company. If you compare it to the music industry, I believe Sega brings rock and roll. In the arcade business, we really had a rock and roll mindset and trying to provide new stuff. So nowadays, we want Sega to always be trying something different, while respecting the old times, too."
Utsumi caught some flack a while back for claiming that Sega is not a retro company, and he expands on this in his conversation with Dring; rather than focus on the past, Sega is now trying to present old concepts in new and innovative ways, while at the same time being mindful of the power of nostalgia:
"This is something I'm always talking to with studios and developers. While we’re caring for all of the products, we need to be innovative at the same time to really attract a new audience. Luckily nowadays, everything around the year 2000 is getting to be hip again. It’s a good tailwind for us. But at the same time, we need to have new elements in the game. The developers know and understand that the nostalgic element, the old element, and the new element are both important."
Sega is currently rebooting several classic franchises, such as Crazy Taxi, Jet Set Radio, Shinobi, Golden Axe and Streets of Rage, and Utsumi points out that this is all part of the plan to balance risky projects with ones which are expected to return a reward:
"We have some solid business lines that are less risky. Sonic… of course the production base is getting bigger, but you can count on a solid return. But some other IPs… we are trying to be wild. It is higher risk, but potentially higher return."
He adds that part of this strategy is to focus on certain audiences and expand them with solid games:
"We are targeting some specific audiences in a deeper way. You might think this game is very specific, but if it goes deep… then sometimes you have a chance to go bigger. So rather than having a huge target audience, we would rather target a narrow group, go deep and expand [that group]."
You can read (and watch!) the full interview with Utsumi here.