Former SEGA exec says games could be big sellers on Wii no matter the quality, Mario & Sonic gave the company a boost
Posted on 7 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in News, Wii | 25 Comments
Jurgen Post has been the COO and president of SEGA Europe since 2012. The company as a whole was in a pretty fragile state back then. After having success with Mario & Sonic and Wii, SEGA saw that sales of the series and Nintendo’s console in general were slowing down, prompting a change.
Post spoke about the situation with GamesIndustry:
“The business model that we had wasn’t working anymore. We were starting to make sizeable losses, so we had to change. In the past, you could be successful by being a bit opportunistic. The Wii platform, ten years ago, was so successful and anything you launched on it was selling. Even with some lesser qualitative stuff, you were able to be successful. But that was all changing and you could only sell quality products. We had Mario & Sonic back in those days, and that game was selling so much that a number of other titles could afford to underperform. But when the sales of Mario & Sonic, and the Wii in general, began to slow down, it became very visible that we had to change.”
SEGA ended up going through a whole slew of changes. The company focused on PC, “being consumer-first, and digital-first,” and made sure that its various studios took on more responsibility.
This was actually Post’s final interview at SEGA. He’s leaving the company to take on a new challenge elsewhere. If you’d like to read the full interview, hit up the source link below.
