SEGA today announced that due to expected heavy losses for the last financial year, the company would be undergoing a structural reform, and thus a number of staff redundancies have been announced across the board.
According to IGN and TSSZ, the entire US QA testing department will be shut down amongst losses amongst other departments such as marketing.
Consequently, SEGA will be trimming it’s roster of games, keeping it’s developing focus on titles such as Football Manager, the Aliens franchise and Sonic the Hedgehog among some of the names to be retained. SEGA did not say which games will be cut, but the company have stated that the reduction in size will benefit in sustained “profitability”.
Although not strictly Sonic-themed news, this announcement will undoubtedly impact the franchise all the way down to the community teams who deal with TSS and other fan sites.
We will keep you posted on any impacts in the Sonic Universe as they come.
I feel awful for everyone whose jobs were cut as a result.
Feels bad, I say.
My heart goes out to the Sega employees that were effected as a result of this. I wish you all the best.
Poor, SEGA employees… I salute those who possibly lost their job or were just effected.
Oh…. and let’s all pray they don’t cut the NiGHTS franchise and the Super Monkey Ball franchise… please…
Remember them saying they were going to give a reboot to a “beloved IP”? …I didn’t realize it involved real people :/ And, well, that’s just great. They got rid of the US QA testing team. I hope it doesn’t affect the quality of the games, but something tells me it will.
Poor guys :/
That’s just sad to hear…this actually puts my hopes for a Shenmue return down once again….
This may not effect Shenmue at all if this happens:
http://www.destructoid.com/yu-suzuki-says-he-can-get-the-shenmue-license-from-sega-219036.phtml
Especially when you consider Yu Suzuki would be dropping a huge wad of cash on SEGA when they evidently could really use the money.
I’ll have to admit, I’m pretty damn scared after hearing this news. What if this eventually affects Sonic’s future in a negative way? 🙁
daaaaamn, that’s crazy.
Ugh, more layoff news from the game industry. Best of luck to everyone who lost their jobs. I just wrote a long diatribe about how broken the game industry clearly is when people losing their jobs en masse has become “business as usual”, but I forgot to enter anything in the email field and so the whole thing got erased on submission.
I’ll keep it short then. Forget rebooting IPs, reboot the game industry.
I feel bad for the employees, but sadly its business. I doubt this will strongly affect Episode 2 or ASR 2, but hopefully this won’t cause another, “Sonic Recession” as I’ve come to call it, with any future Games…
I swear if this stops the production of Jet Set Radio HD…
God bless all those who have lost their jobs due to these lay offs. I hope that you will find work somewhere else. But I too must admit this is pretty scary news, hopefully this doesn’t affect Sonic’s future. 🙁
Man, that’s a shame for those poor workers.
This could also affect the Sonic series as well, possibly in a negative way.
I just hope that putting more focus on Sonic could somehow positively impact the series.
Well, yes. No QA team in the US means that translation errors could get by more easily. It’ll put more pressure on the other teams to make sure everything goes right. Yes, I’m sure Japan has a testing team, but even they miss some things and when it comes to translating…
Hopefully it’ll never be as bad as Sonic ’06 XD
Yeah, Sonic 06 was probably the only Sonic game that I didn’t enjoy playing in any possible way. But I’m sure they won’t do anything like that again!
WELP there goes any hopes of getting a Billy Hatcher sequel anytime soon…
But anyways, Im sure the employees have it even worse
This really bums me out today, as soon as I read the headline earlier this morning. I know a few friends of mine have been working there for years. ==, how is this possible?
That’s really odd, actually. I thought Sega was doing better financially this year. I mean, Generations was one of the best-selling Sonic games ever! Where is their money going?