OPINION: Sega’s new saga

Recent news that Sega has cut back on staff numbers only told the horrible half of a fairly revealing transformation at the company.

You can see the details here, but in short the firm is steeling itself for the digital future by consolidating its boxed product strategy for Europe and North America to its talented European teams. Meanwhile its San Francisco staff are left to focus on newly emerging web platforms.

But a lot of publishers are doing similar things, charging groups in their organisation to devise new digital strategies.

LucasArts, Capcom, Take-Two, Codemasters – all of them and more have said as much in the pages of MCV over recent months. Digital is the word du jour.

Is new Sega US VP Alan Pritchard – one of the key people who has overseen Sega Europe’s expert boxed game strategy – right to say there is a herd mentality amongst publishers in the rush to digital?

Maybe. And it’s worth taking heed of his hint in our Q&A on page 18 that some of the wild ideas in digital distribution will fail, and that there is a mobile content-like bubble there waiting to messily pop.

But the trick is being prepared to meet that challenge head on – and it’s the kind of challenge I reckon an always evolving, always surviving company like Sega should be able to rise to eventually.