SEGA has announced the cancellation of its live service Super Game project and that it is lowering the priority of having Games as a Service in its portfolio for the future.
The news was buried in the company’s latest financial earnings results, and sees five years of work scrapped before any of it could become public. The initiative was first confirmed in May 2021, and was designed to “go beyond the traditional framework of games” for multiple big-budget games “that cross over Sega’s comprehensive range of technologies”.
Reboots of the classic Crazy Taxi, Jet Set Radio, Golden Axe, and Streets of Rage franchises were announced as part of this Super Game plan, but they haven’t been cancelled. Those projects remain in development, and may find themselves under the recently revealed SEGA Universe program instead.
In one of the presentation slides attached to the financial earnings, SEGA said it had reviewed the “strategic positioning” of its live service strategy, and has ultimately decided to cancel its Super Game.
As a result, it’s lowered the priority of having free-to-play games in its catalogue. Over 100 employees who were working on such projects within SEGA have now been moved to “full game development teams focusing on the mainstay IPs”.
