Yesterday, seemingly out of the blue, SEGA announced a joint partnership with Xbox to produce “large scale” games using Microsofts Azure Cloud platform. The small press release states that SEGA’s alliance with Xbox will form a “key part” for their mid-to-long term strategy going forward and allow for the business to move to a new initiative that would focus on key aspects like “Global”, “Online”, “Community”, and “IP utilization”. They are calling it “Super Game” for now, this new initiative will be the center for developing new titles in SEGA’s future.
This new alliance benefits SEGA immensely as it also aims to innovate the company’s infrastructure communications tools for global online services. With next-generation development platforms available, SEGA can adapt to diverse work styles and new infrastructure changes across the board.
Yukio Sugino, President and COO of SEGA said in a comment “…we aim to build an alliance that utilizes both SEGA’s powerful game development capabilities and Microsoft’s cutting-edge technology and development environment.”
Sarah Bond, CVP of Microsoft said “Together we will reimagine how games get built, hosted, and operated, with a goal of adding more value to players and SEGA alike.”
This isn’t the first time Microsoft has made headlines agreeing to work with well-known Japanese studios. Earlier this year, Microsoft signed an agreement to work with renowned developer of the Metal Gear Solid franchise, Hideo Kojima and his studio Kojima Productions. According to a source close to the matter, the two parties agreed to work out a publishing agreement for Kojima to produce a game for Xbox. In fact, one of Phil Spencer’s (Head of Xbox) goals this generation seems to be branching the console into the Japanese market, one that has been very hard for them to crack. In an interview with Tamoor Hussain of Gamespot, Phil commented that “… we’re going to work really hard to have the best generation that we’ve ever had in Japan…”
This likely won’t be the last time we hear about Xbox’s push into the Japanese market or their efforts to work with Japanese studios, and will likely be some time before we see the fruits of that labor. But if it’s any indication of the future, then we might be looking at the culmination of Xbox’s plans in a few years.
Jonathan Sanchez
Article Team
