SEGA Wants To “Reinforce” Its Core Studios, But Don’t Expect New Games Soon

SEGA has just released its latest financial report for Q3 of the current fiscal year, and the accompanying Q&A with company vice president Makoto Takahashi and director Nobuaki Yoshii gives a neat little insight about what the team has planned for the future (thanks, VGC).

After what has been a pretty busy 12 months for SEGA, releasing the likes of Super Monkey Ball Banana Rumble, Sonic X Shadow Generations, Yakuza Kiwami, Metaphor: ReFantazio, and most recently, Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii, the company’s investors were keen to know what comes next. However, the studio heads’ answer implied that the next financial year won’t be quite as packed with new releases.

“The plan is currently being formulated,” the translated SEGA response reads, “but we expect the volume of new titles in Full Game to be lower than this fiscal year”. To be clear, “Full Game” basically refers to any paid title that isn’t DLC, so expansions and free-to-play entries are still on the table here. The company continued to reassure investors that the money will still be coming in, with “continuous revenue contribution from repeat sales of new titles in Full Game this fiscal year and full-scale revenue contribution from new title in F2P”.

The official translation is a little wobbly there, but basically, repeat sales from this year’s releases and free-to-play revenue are expected to keep things squeaky clean over the next 12 months *exhales in investor*.

Let’s not panic too much here. Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds and SHINOBI: Art of Vengeance are already set for a 2025 release, and we’re still awaiting more news of the revivals for Streets of Rage, Jet Set Radio, Crazy Taxi, Virtua Fighter and Golden Axe, so it’s not as if the next fiscal year will be barren on the SEGA front. Just a little quieter than 2024/25… maybe.

Responding to another question, the company implied that it knows where its big hitters lie for future releases. When asked about which studios SEGA will be focusing its efforts into down the line, the company heads said they have “not set any order of priority”, though they flagged Sonic, ATLUS and Like a Dragon studios as ones they would like to “reinforce”:

We have not set any order of priority particularly. For example, ATLUS is an important studio for us to expand Japanese IPs overseas and we think it is necessary to strengthen it, and the studios involved in the Sonic and Like a Dragon IPs are also short of staff, and we are looking to reinforce personnel through additional hiring and M&A.

So there you are — the hot IPs are still front and centre for the studio moving forward, but perhaps FY 2025/26 won’t be quite as rammed with new releases as the last one was. Gotta go… slow? Right?

What do you hope to see from ATLUS and the Sonic / Like a Dragon series next? Let us know down below.