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On their strategy of acquiring existing small studios and cultivating new ones:
“We’ve got an internal team called Searchlight, and Searchlight's focus is to look for new opportunities, mostly content,” John Clark, executive vice president at Sega Europe, told GameDaily. “So whether that's through acquisition or incubation, that's their external development approach. It's a relatively new team, as well as it's a new approach. We work with a couple of studios who were looking for start-up opportunities. In particular, we look for the quality of the team. We look for the vision and the game that they're planning on bringing out. And if we consider that as adding value to Sega, then we take it to the next stage, which is what value does Sega bring to that? We think of ourselves now as developer-led publishers, as opposed to publishing-led games business.”
On streaming services:
“From our point of view, we work with partners, and we're not considering our own platform or our own subscription service,” Clark said. “At this stage we don't know really what subscription means for the gaming audience. We've talked to all the partners that you mentioned. We are part of the plans for Game Pass. And that'll give us a lot of knowledge. We've announced Football Manager as part of that. When it launches, we'll be able to understand how the gaming subscription audience interacts with the title and if subscription is a viable way forward for the games industry. We prefer, at this stage, to be working with channel partners who are investing their time and money to try and understand the audience what the audience wants.”
On Atlus PC ports:
“All I can say is that in working with Atlus, we felt incredibly privileged to be able to bring Catherine to PC,” Clark explained. “And we feel more strongly that there was positive feedback from the community, and we hope that there are people at Atlus who take that into account and do see the positivity of that. It hopefully has a positive impact on our titles going forward, but I can't speak on behalf of them. All I can say is, step one was always about getting Catherine onto Steam, and we're so pleased that we had the opportunity with Atlus to be able to do that.”
On Steam/Epic Games Store:
“We've built up an incredibly strong long-term business with Steam,” he said. “That's a great relationship for us, and we see it as a long-term relationship moving forward as well. With Epic coming to the table, we're really excited by that too, and we're really excited to see what that would bring to the market, what opportunities are to extend the reach via that content. And for us, it's not just about evaluating the revenue share. It's a really important component to it, one that has to be taken into account. But it's not just about that. It's about how you work to send your content to the consumers and deliver an ongoing experience and deliver a relationship.”
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