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The launch of Sega Forever has been positive, the company has argued, although it concedes that there are lessons to be learned.
Sega last week launched a number of its retro titles on mobile under the new Sega Forever banner. The games are free to download and play, although gamers are offered the chance to pay to rid them of ads.
However, critics have been harsh about the quality of the emulation used. Sega Networks’ chief marketing officer Mike Evans has now told Eurogamer that while it acknowledges the issues, they should not detract from what has been achieved.
The launch itself has been really positive – if you look at the vast majority of feedback it’s been strong, if you look at ratings on the app store from consumers there’s definitely some very good sentiment as well,” he said.
Is there room for improvement like anything? Yeah there is. It’s a very ambitious project, and it’s taken a long time to get to this point. We’ve got lots of things planned as we go through, and we’re going to keep on working on that quality. For the vast majority of our fans it’s solid, but the specialist guys who are looking for the absolute epitome of quality, we’re going to keep improving for those guys.
We need to look at the larger trends on reviews as well, so rather than spot-checking one to represent the overall feel, we’ve been actively listening to all the reviews and trying to figure out if there is an area that we need to address.”
Evans also acknowledged that Phantasy Star Online needs a fair bit of work, but says that it has fixed an issue with Sonic the Hedgehog that prevented users from disabling ads.
The exec also addressed claims from the makers of the popular RetroArch emulator that talks had at one stage taken place to use its tech, but broke down due to Sega stubbornly insisting on demanding we relicense our entire program to something that would strip us of all our rights".
Replied Evans: From a Sega perspective, we can’t bundle GPL software with Sega proprietary games, because we lose certain rights within the games – it’s a corporate policy for us."
