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Sega Sammy's integrated report for 2018 has revealed one of the Japan-based company's "Road to 2020" objectives is to simultaneously release games worldwide.

The report touches on the localisation of Japanese games and explains how better quality translations result in a more positive reception from players worldwide.

The Atlus studio located in Calfornia was used to illustrate how the localisation process has been improved within recent times:

Before a Japanese game is released overseas, it is localized into the language of each country and region. For example, Persona 5 has been translated into three languages (English, traditional Chinese, and Hangul). No matter if a game is popular in Japan, it is unlikely to win over fans around the world if the localization is insufficient.

The Sega Group has localization studios that make a huge difference when games are sold overseas. Atlus became a member of Sega Group due to the transfer of business in 2013, which has a studio located in California, U.S.A. The studio understands both Japanese and American games very well, and is able to localize Japanese games in a way that accurately conveys the unique world views of Japanese titles to local gamers. The studio is able to maximize the entertainment value of localized games that reflect these unique world views, and this has led to very positive reviews from local gamers. During the product development stage, game content is shared with the localization team for translation before the development is finished, facilitating the rapid release of foreign language versions of the game.

We will strengthen such collaboration further with the aim of simultaneously releasing games around the world, which is an objective of Road to 2020.

As Sega has previously stated on a number of occasions, it intends to re-release older games and is also at work on new games utilising "idle" IP:

In addition to re-releases, we are also working on completely new games using idle IP like New Sakura Wars (working title), which was announced in April 2018.

How do you feel about waiting for certain Japanese video games to be localised? Are you glad to hear Sega is planning to improve this area of its business? What older Sega IP would you like to see make a return? Tell us below.

[source segasammy.co.jp, via resetera.com]