With several companies like EA, Ubisoft, and more recently Square Enix pointing to blockchain and NFTs as a potential growth factor for their future games, it will be a relief to SEGA fans that this historic game company doesn't have any definite plans to implement such things in their titles.
As spotted by TweakTown, SEGA executives said in a recent Q&A that while studies on the subject are undergoing, the current stance is not to proceed with the addition of blockchain/NFTs if it is perceived as 'simple money-making'.
In terms of NFT, we would like to try out various experiments and we have already started many different studies and considerations but nothing is decided at this point regarding P2E. There have been many announcement about this already including at overseas but there are users who shows negative reactions at this point. We need to carefully assess many things such as how we can mitigate the negative elements, how much we can introduce this within the Japanese regulation, what will be accepted and what will not be by the users. Then, we will consider this further if this leads to our mission “Constantly Creating, Forever Captivating”, but if it is perceived as simple money-making, I would like to make a decision not to proceed.
Elsewhere in the Q&A, SEGA executives also talked about the IPs that have the potential to be expanded in a similar way to Sonic, such as Persona and Project Sekai (Hatsune Miku).
Interestingly, the response also mentioned that SEGA is considering the revival of dormant IPs, even through partnerships with third-party companies.
As for the potential other than Sonic IP, in terms of licensing and merchandising, IPs which we are receiving a lot of offers at the moment, are Persona and Project Sekai. I think we can continue to further roll-out aggressively for these IPs in the future. However, we don’t expect they will grow to the IP that can reach to hundreds of millions of people, at the similar scale with Sonic, at this moment.
In addition, Super Monkey Ball, which we released the remake this year, has a history of recorded millions of downloads once when it was released as a launch title in App Store, and is very popular especially in the U.S., so we may see the possibility of the roll-out in video and merchandising. The offer for making video and remake of past IP is increasing significantly following the success of Sonic movie. We are considering revitalizing the revival of dormant IPs in the future, including the possibility of working with other partners.
SEGA fans have been waiting to get revivals for a very long time. The Japanese company certainly has a treasure trove of IPs worth reviving, such as Crazy Taxi, Condemned, Jet Set Radio, and Shinobi, just to name a few. Which one would you prefer to see again?
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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