There has been a lot of speculation about Sega’s five-year Super Game initiative since it was revealed during its financial results presentation last May. An interview on Sega Japan’s recruitment website last month (translated by VGC) has shed more light on the project. Sega executive VP Shuji Utsumi said, “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.”
Utsumi added that while the several titles that fall under the Super Game banner will vary, they will go beyond the “traditional framework of games.” One example he gave was creating a title that takes advantage of the relationship between those who play games and those who prefer to watch them being streamed. While that does sound quite interesting, Utsumi dampened the enthusiasm with his next line. “It is a natural extension for the future of gaming that it will expand to involve new areas such as cloud gaming and NFTs.” We’ve heard about the cloud gaming aspect of Sega’s Super Game initiative before. The company announced a partnership with Microsoft last November that would see it make games on the Azure Cloud platform. Sega later confirmed that the deal didn’t mean Super Game would be Microsoft exclusive. The NFT part was hinted at in January when Sega registered a ‘Sega NFT’ trademark, but this is the first time they’ve been officially linked to Super Game. It does seem surprising that the company is lauding non-fungibles as the future of gaming, especially given that Ubisoft recently ended support for Ghost Recon Breakpoint, which was set to be the flagship game for its Quartz NFT platform. There was also the shuttering of NFT game F1 Delta Time, the $615 million heist on Axie Infinity, and yet another massive NFT scam.
