Sega Europe has a new boss from Japan

Shuji Utsumi is taking the reins of the struggling subsidiary

Marco Wutz | Jan 10, 2024

Sega Europe has a new boss from Japan /

It looks like Sega’s Japanese headquarters will exercise more direct control over Sega Europe, which has been under fire recently due to a lack of financial performance: Shuji Utsumi, who is already the CEO of Sega America among several other positions in the corporation, has been named as the new CEO of Sega Europe, effective immediately.

According to an official notice from the company, he’ll additionally be named COO and President of Sega as of April 1, 2024, with the current holder of these roles, Yukio Sugino, stepping back and instead taking up Utsumi’s position as Co-COO as well as that of President of Sega Fave.

Sega Europe's new leadership team is taking form / Sega

Shuji Utsumi’s new titles will be President and COO as well as Representative Director of Sega, CEO of Sega America, and CEO of Sega Europe, making him an almost omnipresent executive at the corporation.

Utsumi has an incredible resume in the gaming industry, so there’s no question that he’s got the right chops to bring Sega Europe back on track. He’ll be joined by former Sega Europe CEO and President Jurgen Post, who has recently been announced as returning to the company in its quest to bring back the golden days.

Last year’s last-minute cancellation of Hyenas, a costly live-service shooter in development at Creative Assembly, has brought the lacking financial performance of the publisher’s European subsidiary into the public spotlight.

Alongside some organizational restructuring, which these leadership changes are part of, Sega ordered that its studios should focus back on the specialist titles they were always known for. As a result, Creative Assembly recently announced sweeping changes to its content plans for Total War: Warhammer 3 and Total War: Pharaoh.

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Published Jan 10, 2024

MARCO WUTZ

Marco Wutz is a writer from Parkstetten, Germany. He has a degree in Ancient History and a particular love for real-time and turn-based strategy games like StarCraft, Age of Empires, Total War, Age of Wonders, Crusader Kings, and Civilization as well as a soft spot for Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail. He began covering StarCraft 2 as a writer in 2011 for the largest German community around the game and hosted a live tournament on a stage at gamescom 2014 before he went on to work for Bonjwa, one of the country's biggest Twitch channels. He branched out to write in English in 2015 by joining tl.net, the global center of the StarCraft scene run by Team Liquid, which was nominated as the Best Coverage Website of the Year at the Esports Industry Awards in 2017. He worked as a translator on The Crusader Stands Watch, a biography in memory of Dennis "INTERNETHULK" Hawelka, and provided live coverage of many StarCraft 2 events on the social channels of tl.net as well as DreamHack, the world's largest gaming festival. From there, he transitioned into writing about the games industry in general after his graduation, joining GLHF, a content agency specializing in video games coverage for media partners across the globe, in 2021. He has also written for NGL.ONE, kicker, ComputerBild, USA Today's ForTheWin, The Sun, Men's Journal, and Parade. Email: marco.wutz@glhf.gg