SEGA wants to make Persona, Sonic and Like a Dragon annual franchises

In recent years we have seen SEGA find a comfortable footing within the games industry, releasing an increasing number of highly-regarded games across multiple franchises. Now, the publisher looks set to try and capitalise on this streak of success by turning many of its most popular franchises into annual releases.

As reported by known SEGA insider ‘Midori’ “The current plan at Sega is to make Like a Dragon, Persona and Sonic annual franchises through new titles, remakes and remasters, DLC expansions and other media. I think this is unannounced information.”

While initial reactions to the news was mixed, with fans fearing that the quality of these franchises could deteriorate as a result, Midori offered some additional context, saying:

“But it does not mean a new numbered Persona title is releasing on each year. Spin-offs are also counted as new titles.”

They continued, “The quality of Persona series should not change. Because multiple titles are developed at the same time across multiple years. The current stage of Persona entered development in 2019. The current stage is P6 [Persona 6], P3R [Persona 3 Reload], P5T [Persona 5 Tactica] and P5X [Persona 5: The Phantom X].”

Of course, mandating an annual release schedule can lead to all sorts of issues, including developer burn out, fan burnout – or simply an overall reduction in quality. Hopefully this does not happen with SEGA. We will have to wait and see.

KitGuru says: What do you think of this new strategy? Could it work out in SEGA’s favour? Are annualised franchises a bad idea? Let us know down below.

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