Five years after first announcing the plan, Sega has cancelled its Super Game Project.

The announcement was somewhat buried within the company’s latest financial results document. As seen below, under the “Review of the GaaS Strategy”, Sega lists, “Decided to cancel Super Game” and notes that, “no addition costs associated with the cancellation.”

Sega has also apparently “lowered the priority of F2P” and has moved some 100 employees from F2P development to “Full Game” development team focusing on “mainstay IPs”.

The document also reveals Sega intends on launching 4 full games in financial year 2027, and at least 4 more in financial year 2028.

But let’s go back to the Super Game. At first, it seemed like it was going to be one…well, super game, but an interview a year later with EVP Shuji Utsumi revealed that, “Several titles are being developed within the framework of SuperGame… interactive titles that go beyond the traditional framework of games,”.

Then, an update in the 2023 annual reports mentioned that the “first” game in the Super Game project was nearing completion, reinforcing the idea that there would be numerous titles.

Sega commited a substantial ¥100 billion to the project which was hinted at aiming to blend Sega’s arcade/hardware expertise with trends like cloud gaming (via Microsoft Azure deal) and even NFTs/Web3/metaverse elements. Some of those aspects were walked back on in later interviews, like in 2023 when Sega cooled off on the whole blockchain thing and NFTs.

Sega was aiming to have it released by March of this year. Clearly that never happened. Instead, the project has been largely radio silent over the years, so its cancellation at this point is about as surprising as a new Sonic game being announced.

Presumably, Sega has seen that while there’s massive money to be made in the free-to-play market and live-service, there is also massive risk involved because the market is crowded and dominated by just a few games.