Now this is an odd headline. Sega has a strong stable of games, with Sonic games, various RPG titles by Atlus which they currently own, and also plenty of PC-centric developers, like Creative Assembly , Relic Entertainment and Sports Interactive all sharing the stable. But recently Deep Silver has announced that they will be handling all the game distribution for Atlus games and select Sega games, as per this tweet:
We're bringing @AtlusUSA and select @SEGA titles to Europe! That means YES to Persona 5 and SMT IV: Apocalypse! pic.twitter.com/4GxPiLchQh
— Official Deep Silver (@deepsilver) July 6, 2016
Atlus (and also a few other Japanese developers) have issues on publishing their games in Europe, which leads to a later release date for EU region, or in some cases, never see a release. Nippon Ichi Software used to handles Atlus games in Europe, but Europe-based publisher Deep Silver has now taken up the mantle on distributing the games there.
But here’s the thing: since Atlus is now under Sega, and Sega is a known publisher, why not just let Sega do all the publishing? In a blog post on Sega’s website, they clarified that while Sega does indeed have a Europe branch, but they are a different beast altogether.
Sega Europe houses the Western IPs and devs studios, as mentioned before. Recently Sega Europe has partnered with Playsport Games to publish Motorsport Manager (think Football Manager but for racing teams) and 4X indie developers Amplitude Studios, further cementing their stable of PC games. This resulted them to operate more digitally, PC players tend to buy games on platforms like Steam. When it comes to physical distribution, it is handled in partnership with, well, Deep Silver.
In this context, partnering with Deep Silver makes tons of sense for Sega. Deep Silver take some flak from its recent titles (Homefront The Revolution, Mighty No. 9) they have the expertise to distribute a game, especially in their home region. Europeans will now have some glimmer of hope for some Atlus games to arrive in their shore without the need to import it.
What does this all means to us Asian folks? Whenever you think some games don’t even bother to release in Asia, just remember that Europe also has similar issues too. Luckily we get some Bandai Namco games, like Gundam Breaker 3 that are English translated specifically for South East Asia.
Whereas we still need to import Yakuza 5 and 0, unless you can read Japanese or Simplified Chinese. So there’s that too.