Sega’s President Is Chasing Disney-Style Fandom That Doesn’t Require Picking Up a Controller

The person leading Sega believes people who have never played a Sega game can still count as fans. He even calls them fans himself.

Shuji Utsumi, Sega’s President and COO, told Japan’s Nikkei business newspaper that the company is leaning hard into transmedia expansion. That means merchandise, concerts, stage shows and pop-up events — all designed to pull in people who watch YouTube streams of games rather than play them.

“Even if these people haven’t played the games, we consider them to be fans and gamers in our eyes,” Utsumi said.

Like a Dragon’s Female Merchandise Buyers

The crime-drama franchise’s merchandise sells well, and Utsumi cited the Like a Dragon series as proof of the trend. He noted that the purchasers are not the audience you would typically anticipate.

“About 60-70% of all merchandise purchased for the series is by women,” Utsumi said.

The people who come to love these games usually find the series via videos posted by several YouTubers, rather than playing the games themselves. They become attached to the world, the story and the characters simply from watching those clips on YouTube.

“There are a lot of people who have become fans of the world, story and characters of the series simply by watching YouTube channels and streams by different YouTubers,” he said. “Amongst those people are a lot of people who haven’t played the games themselves.”

According to Utsumi, transmedia content expands the ways fans can enter a fandom, and in certain instances, he claimed that those who don’t play the games can become more deeply involved than the players themselves.

Disney’s Licensing Playbook

The approach Utsumi has adopted traces back to his tenure at Disney Interactive Asia, where he observed a tightly organized licensing operation that Sega is now emulating.

“Disney will implement a clear program of licensing their IP when releasing a movie in order to maximize profits,” he said.

Each Disney film gets its own slot on the calendar, and Sega is following suit by organizing its own releases into a similar schedule.

“We had a system of creating a calendar around a film’s release and building relationships with licensees that went back for a long time, and we’d develop clothing, stationery, toys and other necessities using the IP from that,” he said. “I feel I’m currently incorporating a similar transmedia strategy into my work at Sega at the moment.”

The Japanese company has already established its first physical stores in Japan, added retail outlets in China, held pop-up events across the globe, and put on concert series for game music. Every one of these efforts generates money from its properties without selling games directly to players.

The Super Game That Died

The transmedia and games-as-a-service thinking was behind the creation of “Super Game,” Sega’s planned project. Its cancellation came as the scale of investment and operation grew massively.

“Our transmedia expansion is centered on growing our business outside of games, but Sega is still a games developer, and we couldn’t ignore the games-as-a-service sector,” he said.

The project grew more difficult as development went on.

“If we could create something from scratch that can appeal on a large scale globally using our IP, the reward from that would have been enormous,” he said. “We tried to make it worth it by developing the technology we had, yet as we got further into development, the scale of investment and the scale of the operation of the game grew massively, and things became more and more difficult. Based on the current global circumstances we determined it would be too difficult to keep progressing work on it at this time, so we chose to cancel the Super Game.”

The move was prompted by swelling investment and expanding scope. Utsumi pointed out that supply-chain troubles and climbing expenses are straining consistency and expansion in the existing business. PC is gaining ground as a platform, and Sega has seen sales rise from putting out more titles on Microsoft systems.

Nostalgia and Old IP

Sega is still in the game business. The company is working on new titles built around older intellectual property, with Crazy Taxi among them, a name that brings back fond memories for GenX and Millennial players alike.

That firm’s modern strategy aims to take advantage of its marketable characters, not just to make new games but to create more ways to appeal to people who don’ takes part in the contests.

Games as Culture

Games have moved from being simple toys to standing alongside movies and music as major cultural forces, according to Utsumi. This shift calls for a fresh way of doing business.

“When I first got involved in games, I felt both players and developers saw that games were, first and foremost, toys,” he said.

The text opens with a quotation from “Thanks to efforts to elevate games to be seen as a grander form of entertainment, the medium has become a dominant form of culture like movies and music. If you’re developing games across these current developments and trends, it’s important to consider how best to expand these IP and maximize profits, and transmedia expansion is part of that.”, which sets the scene for the discussion to follow. The remainder of the passage is structured around a series of numbered items, each offering further detail on the subject at hand.

This approach is not exclusive to Sega. For years, Japanese entertainment has relied heavily on merchandising and multimedia expansion. The global popularity of anime has helped the Japanese music industry by raising the profile of artists tied to hit shows. Sega hopes to achieve the same kind of boost for its own library.

Utsumi’s definition of “fan” leaves plenty of room for interpretation. He wants to see more people fitting it, even if they never hold a controller in their hands.

Source: kotaku.com

gaming industry · Like a Dragon · merchandising · Sega · transmedia