Sega has filed paperwork today to inform investors that it will be splitting its gaming divisions into two separate entities as of April 2021. The first entity will cover PC and console game development and publishing and the second will focus on arcade and pachinko machines.
SegaSammy has had a turbulent year in 2020 with the COVID 19 pandemic wreaking havoc on its arcade business in japan with a stay at home and social distancing orders in place. Japan is also now experiencing what some would call the third wave of infections of the virus. Recently SegaSammy finalised plans to restructure its workforce with a special redundancy program which has been taken up by over 700 employees.
What this means in the short term is that Sega will make itself more agile in the upcoming gaming landscape and able to better weather the financial storm that is plaguing most traditional retail and hospitality businesses and offer a shield / firewall to the console and PC development studios. It also provides a more agile focus in creating development deals and content distribution plans. more in depth details of the plan can be read here.
In other news today Yakuza creator Toshihiro Nagoshi will be stepping down from the board of directors and working in a more creative driven role, bolstering game development. While the executive suite will also receive a shake up, the Chief Creative Officer role has been struck from the team and Former Chairman and Group CEO Hajime Satomi will now leave the CEO title and position in favor of is son Haruki Satomi, who has been for a while the face of the company as COO (Chief Operating Officer) and will be the new CEO as of April 1, 2020.
For now the outlook for SEGA group is strong with the firm confirming these changes should not adversely affect the groups ability to meet its earnings targets this year.
What actually happened is a small overseeing company (Sega Group Corp and Sega Corp are now just Sega Corp) got done away with.
Let’s not people!
It would be fun, but let’s see what happens.
Let’s not start a million twitter threads and have some poor PR intern come out at like something AM in Japan and put out tweet that says “Nah, nothing happening”
Makes XboxEra look bad, makes Microsoft look bad, nobody wins.
Ok bud calm down haha I’m not one of those people who are like but this is exactly what MS would’ve wanted before they bought them as they don’t give a shit about the arcade business.
There is way too much smoke around this and this just adds to that, obviously nothing is official but damn is it getting interesting. I do get where you’re coming from though, some people can be a bit iffy lol.
It’s interesting to see though how Sega will proceed in the future. They’ve been doing very well in the West with their Sega Europe studios. With the Japanese console market shrinking they’ll probably focus on that even more.
I’m just gonna say they’re buying them, because I find this fear of “other message boards will laugh at you!” to be so utterly ridiculous that I’m gonna run full speed in that direction
