Page 3...Interview: Peter Moore, President and COO of Sega of America:

NG:  In an interview with Primagames...

PM:  Well, if it’s developers rather than publishers, they’re obviously different animals.  I mean, we own ten developer studios 100%, so that’s nine studios in Japan that you’re very familiar with such as Visual Concepts who do all of Sega Sports.  But in looking at what we need to do to continue to do well in this business, we’ll be looking for more development support.  Not only from within our studios but also from outside, a good example is when we shipped Quake 3; that was done as an outside development project, but it was brought in as a first-party game.  We’ll start looking for more and more of that.  From a publishing perspective, we’ll continue to have good relationships with other third-party publishers, whether that’s EA, or THQ, or Acclaim, or Activision, or any of the big boys; we have good relationships, we’re in the same business together.  I serve on the Industry Board with the presidents of those other companies, and I think it’s important that even though we’re all competitive, we need to get together on the issues that we face together.  Piracy is a big issue that we all face.

NG:  Something like Napster?

PM:  Yeah, I mean, anything that threatens our livelihoods which, sometimes gamers think that it’s okay to download games.  But, ultimately that means that money is flowing away from the industry and we can’t afford to make great games.  The more that piracy is prevalent, the less money there is to make great games and it’s as simple as that.  It’s a business, and gamers seem to think that it’s okay; look at Dreamcast, we’ve got people trying to download and burn games to a GD-ROM format.  So Nintendo is probably the least susceptible to that because of their proprietary cartridge format, but they’re going to, albeit a proprietary disc – you know, any content that’s digitalized can be knocked off and downloaded, ultimately.  So our relationship with publishers continues to be very strong.

NG:  Even though you are now beginning to compete with them?

PM:  Yeah [pause] I think that ultimately we all need the industry to grow collectively and so there’s a lot of stuff that we need to do.  We also need to be careful; I went to Congress last September and testified on behalf of the industry to John Mckain’s senatorial hearing on marketing violence to children.  The industry needs to rally together, just as all of the publishers got together there, and we need to be very proud of the ratings system that we have through the ESRB, which I think is very very good.  Particularly when you look at movies and music, which just don’t have that powerful system that we use.  So, the industry needs to stay together and we need to support that.

NG:  What is your opinion on videogame violence then?

PM:  Um, At my house ‘M’ rated games don’t get played, I mean my son’s going to be 15 next week and don’t think it’s appropriate.  He’s a bigger fan of sports anyway, so I won’t bring home (even though I’ve got plenty of copies of them) things like Quake and what have you – I just don’t think it’s appropriate.  The same goes for music, I have a 17-year-old daughter who will listen things like Eminem, but I also have a nine-year-old daughter in the next bedroom, and I don’t need that kind of music.  So, when she goes to college she can listen to whatever the heck she wants, but you have to be able to – it’s the parent’s responsibility, my job, not the government’s job, to decide what goes on in my house.  I’m very happy to do that, but I don’t want the government making any of those decisions for me. 

NG:  What was your reaction to hearing rumors about Sega and Nintendo joining forces?  I forget what the publication was that fabricated that...

PM:  The New York Times, it was the New York Times, it was silly, Sega and Nintendo have had cordial relationships for years but I couldn’t see, and no one really in the industry could see any really sense in Sega and Nintendo coming together.  I mean, it just didn’t really make any sense at all.  So, Sega issued a statement, and Yamamashi Comosan of Nintendo issued a statement, but the New York Times never retracted it.  We asked them to retract the story and, of course, they never did.  I mean, it was just a load of Cod’s wallup, it was just really a stupid story.

NG:  Cod’s what?

PM:  Cod’s wallup, it’s an Olde English thing. [laughing] It’s more polite than ‘crap’, but it’s really the same thing.  

NG: [laughing]  So, what do you think was the instigation of that story?

PM:  I think that it could have been a number of – well, two things.  Our new head of content worked with Nintendo through a company called 'recruit,' and I think that people saw that as the first step for Sega and Nintendo coming together.  Secondly, I’m sure that a number of Sega executives and a number of Nintendo executives were getting together to discuss the future of Game Boy Advance.  So, probably someone from Sega was seen at Nintendo’s headquarters talking about GBA and again, somebody put two and two together and came up with this ridiculous story.  It made no sense, and as you can see, completely untrue.  And, quite frankly, those people should have been ashamed of themselves; they never truly retracted the story.

...Page 4; Evaluating Sega's Future Options.