Sega’s President Acknowledges Live-Service Games as the Company’s Greatest Challenge

Shuji Utsumi, the President of Sega and CEO of Sega America and Europe, stated that live-service games are the biggest challenge for the Japanese company.

According to Utsumi, companies that achieve the best results in the industry are those that manage to have a solid GaaS (Games as a Service) business, a goal that remains a significant challenge for Sega and will continue to be in the future.

Sega’s Efforts to Overcome the Challenge

“One of the biggest challenges is the GaaS [Games as a service] business for us. The game companies with a strong record tend to have a strong GaaS business globally,” Utsumi said in an interview with The Game Business. “Console/PC standalone business is getting to be better but we are still working on making the GaaS business global. So that’s one of the big challenges.”

One of the ways Sega plans to carve out its share of this market is through the acquisition of Rovio, the creators of Angry Birds, in 2023. Sega has given Rovio full access to create a live-service game based on its most popular IPs. This has led to the development of Sonic Rumble and Sonic Blitz.

“They have deep knowledge of the global mobile business and they have very strong IP like Angry Birds. We are giving [Rovio] access to our IPs including Sonic to come up with nice welcoming GaaS titles,” said Utsumi.

Before acquiring Rovio, Sega had already shown interest in this sector of the market. An example is the multiplayer shooter Hyenas, which was canceled during development because it did not meet the company’s quality standards.