Sega And Microsoft Join Forces To Produce "Large-Scale, Global Games"

Sega and Microsoft are teaming up, announcing today that the two companies would seek to "create New Strategic Titles for SEGA and establish a Next-Generation Development Environment" built on Microsoft's Azure cloud platform. According to the press release from Sega, the focus will be on "new and innovative titles where the key focuses are 'Global', 'Online', 'Community' and 'IP utilization'.

Those are a lot of buzzwords, but do they mean anything beyond "Sega will use Azure for its online games in the future"? Probably not, though the question of just how large Sega's games can grow with the aid of the platform -- "large-scale, global games in a next-generation development environment" was mentioned near the start of the press release -- make you wonder what scale those future games will have.

We can at least hope that the new alliance will make for smoother launches than the one that Phantasy Star Online 2 had, which was a mess on when it launched on the Microsoft Store in May 2020. While it's nice to think that the new alliance will lead to better products, it's also worrisome to think that, no matter what the issues Sega's future games might have, they'll be locked into Microsoft's services, for good or for bad.