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SEGA apologizes for the delays in their SEGA AGES lineup, explains why things are taking longer than expected
SEGA has been releasing multiple titles in their SEGA AGES lineup over the last few months, but things aren't coming out at the pace SEGA initially mentioned/expected. In an interview with Game Watch, Sega producer Kagasei Shimomura apologizes for the delays, and explains why things aren't coming out at the pace SEGA originally planned. Translation courtesy of NintendoEverything...
We feel very bad that our releases have been much slower than we initially planned. We understand that some fans are upset by this, and we apologize for letting you down. I believe there were some things that we spent too much time developing, but I hope all our fans understand that this extreme attention to detail was necessary to meet our fans’ expectations of the titles in this collection. No one needs a mediocre or half-baked game. We will strive as a team to accomplish the goals we set out to do.
On one hand, the timing of the release is crucial. We want to get the game in the hands of players at the best possible time, based on market research. We don’t want the project to get lost amongst others and we don’t want to lose sight of releasing a great game.
Those two points sort of contradict each other, so it’s tough to find perfect harmony. We were certainly affected by this delicate balance and it caused the development some strain. Therefore, we ended up releasing the game later than anticipated.
M2 really put in tremendous efforts and made the release of “SEGA AGES Phantasy Star” possible. One of the reasons for the delay was the fact that there were some learning curves with the Nintendo Switch. It took extra time to get the SEGA AGES format to pair up with the new hardware. All of those learning curves are behind us now, so I think you can expect our releases at a faster pace moving forward.
Not only are the staff at M2 more familiar with the hardware, but they’ve added new members to the team, as well. We want to get as close as possible to the release schedule that we first planned out. However, we have to accept that our initial goal of releasing 15 titles over the course of one year may not be possible.