Three days ago Game Daily published a rather disturbing interview to Simon Jeffery, president of Sega of America.
After the announcement of the US and european release of Valkyria Chronicles, I thought that SEGA finally stepped on the right way. Maybe I was wrong.
In the aforementioned interview, Jeffery brought up a few points that I honestly find quite dangerous at best, and pretty much disastrous if we consider the worst scenario: he basically said that he can't wait to get into the mobile and casual gaming market (like we need more party games at the moment), but this isn't even the worst thing:
what sounds absolutely terrifying, is the following part of the article:
Jeffery has also been able to convince Sega's management in Japan that games sold in the U.S. need to be built in the West while appealing to Western tastes.
"Much of the product that comes out of Japan isn't really suitable or appropriate culturally for the Western market," Jeffery notes, "and Sega has become the first of the Japanese gaming companies to recognize that the global market has various tastes and isn't necessarily just one great big Japanese market."
Geez, this really sounds like more totally flat western-made FPSs (do we really need any more? There's a FLOOD of them) and less really classy and interesting japanese-style games to be localized in the US and in Europe.
Can't the views expressed by Jeffery be more blind?
Maybe he didn't notice that there are TONS of western developers around, and all of them have totally flooded the market with western-style games, every one of which looks exactly the same as the one that came before: "Bang! Boom! Kablast! Ayeee! Kill Kill Kill! No story, no deep characters, no nothing.
He also didn't notice that the western market is, as of now, absolutely STARVING for Japanese games. There are way too few out there. And they're exactly what made older generation consoles sell so well, while their lack is one of the factors that is holding back the sales of two-in-three of the last generation consoles (expecially one). It doesn't take a degree in marketing to notice that.
I honestly hope that SEGA's management in Japan won't ultimately listen to Jeffery's disastrous suggestions, and, besides Valkyria Chronicles, will bring us other japanese masterpieces like Yakuza 3.
We're already missing too much of what's released in the Japanese market even without an american executive that's probably a bit too fond of his heritage being allowed to jeopardize further localizations. So please Sega, listen to your CUSTOMERS, expecially the ones that actually supported you even during the dire moments of the Dreamcast.
We want SEGA-style games, not just another FPS!
PS: just to let you understand what we might miss, here's one of Yakuza 3's trailers:
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
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