Sega has, almost overnight, revamped itself as a digital business by backing away from boxed goods and will grow its big hits via digital channels. Michael French met Europe COO Jurgen Post to find out more
WHEN you’re the editor-in-chief of MCVand you sit down in front of a publisher boss, you’re obligated to ask a few well-worn questions. One is about the competition. Another is about market share. But when we meet with Jurgen
Post a week before Sega Europe goes public on some heavy duty restructuring, his answers to the staple MCVquizzing are more surprising than the confession of plans to shut down territory offices and focus on digital games. He shrugs. “‘Market share’? Isn’t that a little irrelevant these days?” Okay… What about the
competition? Who does the reborn online-centric Sega want to be compared to? Zynga? Blizzard? “Hello Kitty,” he says. And “World of Tanks”.
So that’s the most iconic Japanese character of all time... and a niche PC war game. Same old questions, maybe. But the answers are some of the freshest MCV’s had.
PILLARS TO POST You don’t need us or Post to give you a lesson on the trends that spurred Sega to change. In the traditional market, the big games have gotten bigger; boxed new IP is a luxury for only the very rich or rogue indies; retail is often too risky. Sega’s answer has been to (partly) remove itself from play in that space. It has hugely successful franchises and potent properties, and the performance of those alone underline how useful new channels have become. “It’s not like we are disappearing – certainly not – but it’s definitely a shift in focus,” says Post when MCVasks what the restructuring means for the Sega business. “It’s definitely a different company to what it was. You need a lot of different expertise to manage all the different
14 July 13th 2012
revenue streams. You still have traditional games development, but there is a lot more bolted onto that now: iOS, Android, and then free-to- play. All of that now matters to our four pillar IPs. And free-to-play, for instance, needs a completely different energy because you go to games as a service model instead of a transactional model. “But we are still Sega.”
Those four pillar IPs are testament to that. In fact, dispensing of tricky licences and hit-or-miss games makes the company more Sega than ever. Sonic leads the way of course, but Football Manager, Total Warand potential gold mine licence Aliens have been highlights in Sega’s recent history. Post says the PC-led games specifically have excelled in their fields and set the agenda for the company on digital platforms like Steam and the App Store. “It’s because of those areas that, whenever I get asked the question ‘What kind of market share would you like to achieve?’, I think… Well, ‘What segment? What market?’ “You can’t do everything right and
you can’t be in every possible market – but you can excel in many of them.”
ALL IN ONE
That same thinking has spread through to the way Sega structures its staff around its IPs now. The Creative Assembly games, for instance, are produced with marketing and development in unison. “For us, those four pillars are about the best