Earlier this week, before all of the madness surrounding the Xbox layoffs, SEGA president Shuji Utsumi was interviewed as part of an extensive feature over at The Game Business, giving his thoughts on a whole variety of topics.
One of the areas he touched on was the future of consoles and how the "big trend" of PC and mobile is somewhat taking over - something that Xbox has been focusing on a lot with the likes of PC Game Pass, Xbox Play Anywhere, Xbox Cloud Gaming and the whole "This is an Xbox" campaign over the past few months and years.
Nevertheless, he believes "there are lots of ways to enjoy games", and console remains a key focus for SEGA:
"The big huge trend is PC, with its global market reach, and mobile, of course, which is getting better and better in terms of graphics.”
"Sometimes you want to play in different styles. Sometimes you want to relax and play in the living room with the big screen... There are lots of ways to enjoy games, and among all those activities, I want to believe the console is going to give us very nice opportunities.”
Elsewhere in the chat, Utsumi advised he's had a "big attachment to the console business" since being a member of the PlayStation launch team, and highlighted how Nintendo in particular has made a "great contribution" in recent years.
Nevertheless, he did acknowledge that the games industry is getting "tougher" in the console space:
"If you look at the video game industry, the base is still expanding. So, while it's getting tougher, maybe for console, the game business overall is still growing. There is opportunity to reach more and more people. I am optimistic about it.”
The whole thing is well worth reading (and watching!) if you're interested, with the SEGA president going into multiple other topics such as movies, a portfolio that balances "old with new", games-as-a-service titles and much more.