According to reports by Mobilegamer.biz, Sega’s co-COO Shuji Utsumi was present at the Roviocon event which took place in Helsinki on Wednesday, November 29, 2023. During the event, Utsumi talked about the future of Sega’s mobile games after acquiring Rovio for $776 million in August.
Utsumi revealed that new Angry Birds animated projects are in production and that new games by Rovio were in development for consoles and PCs. During the discussion, Utsumi also made reference to a Sonic and Angry Birds crossover and joked that both IPs were “dating”.
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According to Utsumi, the merger between Rovio and Sega will help the latter expand its range of mobile games. In other words, some of the previous Sega titles that were only available on console and PC may come to mobile.
“Mobile is a massive platform for us,” Utsumi said. “By combining together with Rovio, Sega is now able to pave the way for global mobile game audiences. Sega and Rovio have been working on new mobile game projects based on our own IP… but Sonic is not the only IP to benefit from the mobile platform expansion. It will be a potential strong tailwind for other key Sega IPs such as Yakuza and Persona.”
Utsumi also revealed that Sega wants to play a bigger role in the subscription game services like Xbox Game Pass, Apple Arcade, and Netflix. That goal is already manifesting in the release of Apple Arcade exclusives Sonic Dream Team, Sonic Racing, and ChuChu Rocket! Universe.
Sega said Sonic Superstars sales were lower than expected
During the latest financial results briefing this month, Sega Sammy Holdings president and group CEO Haruki Satomi said Sonic Superstars had a weaker start than the company had hoped. However, they anticipate that it will eventually pick up.
“Sonic Superstars was released in October, which is a slightly weaker start than we had anticipated,” said Satomi. “But in reality, when Sonic IP sells the most is mainly November to December… we plan to continue our marketing efforts to sell on the same level as Sonic Frontiers.”
In the Question and Answer section following the presentation, Satomi was asked if Sonic Superstars sales fell short of expectations. In response, the company head mentioned that the release of the game had come during a busy period. Nevertheless, he was hopeful that sales would continue to grow because of the positive reception from critics that the game enjoyed.
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“We believe that the impact of other companies’ major titles released simultaneously is significant, but we plan to expand the promotion towards the holiday season, especially in the overseas market,” Satomi said. “Both the Metacritic score and user score are higher than Sonic Frontiers, and we would like to continue to sell firmly.”
Sonic Superstars had the highest Metacritic score of 76 on Xbox. That score dropped to 73 on PS5 and further to 71 on Nintendo Switch. Sonic Frontiers, on the other hand, recorded the highest score of 75 on PS4 and PC while the score dropped to 71 on PS5, 69 on Nintendo Switch, and 61 on Xbox.
Creative Assembly will return to working on a familiar genre
In September Sega announced that it had canceled Hyenas, the ambitious multiplayer shooter by Creative Assembly, in addition to other unannounced titles under development. It was also revealed that some of the projects had been in development for up to six years.
Although Creative Assembly suggested that the game was canceled because Sega believed it couldn’t stand the “competition with some of the greats”, Satomi said during the financial presentation that the developer was working on a genre it wasn’t totally familiar with which led to the cancellation of the game and several redundancies.
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“Each studio has its own strengths and weaknesses, but the favorable winds of the early COVID-19 period, coupled with the strong performance of each title, led us to adopt a strategy of accelerating more, even in areas where those studios have not tried yet for further growth,” Satomi said.
“However, some studios did well and some did not, so we have decided to focus again on the strengths of each studio. To put it simply, Creative Assembly was good at offline games in the RTS genre, but they took on the challenge of developing Hyenas, an online game in the FPS genre. Although the game itself was good, we decided to cancel the development of Hyenas because we did not think it would reach a quality that would satisfy our users when we considered whether we could really operate this as a competitive online game for a long period of time.”
After the cancellation of Hyenas, there were reports that the staff of Creative Assembly were unhappy with its development. during the Q&A session of the financial report, Satomi was asked about the future structure of Sega’s European studios.
“As part of the process of structural reform centered on Creative Assembly,” Satomi said, “we intend to optimize the workflow and concentrate their resources on the development of their specialty genres.”
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