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SEGA's president has explained why the publisher decided to cancel its ambitious 'Super Game' project in a recent interview.
Speaking to Nikkei, Shuji Utsumi talks about the live service venture and the reasoning behind it being canned, ultimately putting it down to limited resources.
While discussing the publisher's approach to transmedia projects, the subject changes to Super Game. (Quotations via Google Translate.)
"Transmedia's strategy centres on expanding IP-related businesses into fields other than games, but SEGA is still fundamentally a game-based company," Utsumi says. "And within that game industry, one area that cannot be ignored is [Games as a Service]."
Utsumi says the company thought it "had the technology to successfully launch a global, large-scale IP that we created from scratch" and that the investment in a large-scale live service game would pay dividends.
"However, as we continued our research, we realized that the scale of investment and operations would also grow enormously in line with the scale of the service, and we saw the difficult aspects. As a result, considering the global situation, we decided that taking on this challenge now would be too risky. That is why we canceled the development of Super Game."
In other words, it became clear to SEGA that it would be too expensive and take up too many resources. It was going to be a big risk, one that the company ultimately decided was not worth pursuing.
SEGA announced the Super Game in 2021, but very little was said about it at the time.
Eventually, it was misinterpreted by many to be analogous with the publisher's push for retro revivals like Crazy Taxi: World Tour and Shinobi: Art of Vengeance.
However, the Super Game was in fact an entirely separate project — an ambitious title the company was positioning as its prime live service entity.
The game was wrapped in mystery for several years before it was confirmed to be cancelled in May 2026.
While SEGA has lowered its priority on free-to-play and live service games, Utsumi says "there are business opportunities" still to be found in these areas, so it's not abandoning them entirely.
For now, though, the company has a pretty busy slate of upcoming stuff, including the aforementioned Crazy Taxi revival, Stranger Than Heaven, Virtua Fighter Crossroads, Persona 6, Alien Isolation 2, and more.