Last May, Sega unveiled its five-year strategic plan, including creating a "super game," in its earnings report, and parent company Sega Sami will invest $882 million over the next five years to achieve this ambition.
Recently, Sega published an interview related to the "Super Game" program on its own talent recruitment website, and Sega Vice President Sushi Uchiha, producer Masayoshi Kikuchi, and General Manager Katsuru Kui also talked about many details of the "Super Game" plan.
Last year's Sega financial report in the "Super Game" 5-year plan
As for the definition of "super game", Kikuchi Masayoshi said:
Sega offers a wide range of game content, including hardware and arcade games, which also requires the application of technology in a variety of fields. Our plan for Super Games is to apply Sega's technologies to create multiple AAA games and work on achieving it in a 5-year plan.
Under the framework of "super games", each game will be different, but there is no doubt that they will become interactive works that go beyond the traditional game framework. For example, in the past, the group of people who played the game was called the player, and today, when watching the game has become a culture, these people may also be called the player. There is great potential in the relationship between the two groups of players, and we are also considering the possibility of creating new forms of entertainment medium in this relationship.
Under Kikuchi's description, "Super Game" will meet the following 4 criteria: multi-platform; global multi-language; global simultaneous release; and AAA level works. In other words, the Super Games program is being developed with the goal of world-class hits.
Under the framework of "Super Games", there are currently a number of games under development. Take Katsuya Kuai's team, for example, which initially had 50 people and would eventually grow to hundreds. In addition to the new IP titles being developed, there will also be some games that are based on existing titles, and there will be systems in which viewers can also join the game process.
In the interview, Kui also said that the current AAA works in the "Super Game" program basically use Unreal Engine 5, and will also use a variety of AI technologies to help improve front-end performance such as in-game camera control and sound effect synthesis.
At the same time, cloud games and NFTs and other trends that may become more popular in the future, Sega also sees the extent to which these technologies are more appropriate to apply, and there are also different views in the development team of "Super Games".
Sega announced a strategic partnership with Microsoft last November, with the former using the latter's Azure cloud platform to help achieve plans for globalization, IP applications, community operations, and more.
In addition, in January this year, Sega also registered the trademark "Sega NFT". Just a week before the trademark was registered, Sega CEO Osamu Satomi expressed a negative view of NFTs, arguing that if NFTs were just "simple money-making tools", sega would never do it.
The "Sega NFT" logo was unveiled in January this year