Satomi Speaks about Sega's Future with the Sonic Series

Sonic games have been through the mud and back when it comes to consumer criticism. Some games used to be good, some are better. We wrote a while back about the Sonic Nostalgia Problem. If you were unhappy with games like Sonic '06, know that the president and COO of Sega Sammy feels the same way.

Sega Sammy Holdings president Haruki Satomi recently spoke in an interview with CNBC about the merger between Sega and Sammy in 2004, and his hopes and goals for the world famous hedgehog:

Several years ago when we launched a Sonic game, the reception was very bad. There was a site called Metacritic that aggregates the critics and scores games from 1-100, and at that time the Sonic game got 30 out of 100. [We] did not meet those expectations for the big fan base we have. So after I took the lead, [I said] it will never happen again and I told our development team or even sales team that we should not release a game unless we 100% agree with and are confident of the quality.

While the series still hasn't fully recovered from their dark times, they've been making gradual strides towards better. Satomi is mindful of the communities feedback and takes it into consideration when working future projects.

Many people send email or Facebook messages asking me to make this kind of game, or please bring back this title again, or please improve the quality of this title again, so I try to answer those questions and requests.

 
We can see evidence of this with Sonic Mania, which released last year. The fan-made Sonic game was a homage to the 2D platforming style that brand was born from. It would later go on to be widely considered one of the best Sonic games Sega has ever published.

Perhaps we can expect to see more games like Sonic Mania, at least if Satori can help it.