The cloud-based development environment (in which the Japanese company uses Microsoft’s Azure technology) is not just for one game.

We wrote about the announcement of Super Game perhaps back in May or November, when SEGA Sammy, SEGA’s parent company, announced that it would invest $882 million over the next five years to realise its ambitions for Super Game. It sounded like this could be the budget for just one game, but that’s not the case, as an in-house interview clarified that the definition was for multiple, big-budget games (and thus, the development environment makes sense).

VGC translated what Shuji Utsumi Shuji, the executive vice president, wrote on SEGA’s Japanese job listing page, “SEGA offers a wide range of game content, including hardware and arcade content, which is made possible by its diverse range of technologies. We have defined ‘SuperGame’ as the development of AAA titles that cross over SEGA’s comprehensive range of technologies, and we will aim to achieve this in our five-year plan. Several titles are being developed within the framework of SuperGame. While each title will vary, there is no doubt that they will be interactive titles that go beyond the traditional framework of games. For example, people who played games were called gamers in the past, but now watching games has become a culture in itself, and such people could no longer be called gamers. There is great potential in the relationship between people who play and watch games. We are thinking of creating new entertainment within these possibilities.” He wrote it as “SuperGame”, but it could be correct as one or two words. The words matter, not if there is a space between them.

According to Utsumi, a Super Game must meet four criteria: it must be multiplatform; it must have global multi-language; it must be released simultaneously worldwide; and it must be AAA. We’ve seen this before from other Japanese publishers (e.g. Monster Hunter World from Capcom, although the PC version came months later). Katsuya Hisai, SEGA’s general manager, has said that several projects are in the works under Super Game. About 50 people in his department are already working on something in pre-development status. He expects the staff to number in the hundreds by the end.

And Kikuchi Masayoshi, a producer at SEGA, wrote on the site, “Gaming has a history of expansion through the connection of various cultures and technologies. For example, social networking and game video viewing are recent examples. It is a natural extension for the future of gaming that it will expand to involve new areas such as cloud gaming and NFT. We are also developing SuperGame from the perspective of how far different games can be connected.”

So NFTs won’t be left out either… oh, they will use Unreal Engine 5, too.

Source: VGC