Yesterday, Sega made a move that its mascot Sonic the Hedgehog is sure to approve of — entering into a partnership agreement with Utomik. Twenty-one Sega titles have been posted up on the service in Europe and North America, including Alpha Protocol, The Cave, EMPIRE: Total War, Total War: SHOGUN II – Fall of the Samurai and Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode I and Episode II.
This benefits Utomik, due to yet another game publisher joining its rapidly growing library of games; and it benefits Sega because a new distribution channel for its PC games has just opened up.
It’s interesting that Utomik employs unique technology that drastically changes the process by which consumers play games. Sega Community Manager Daniel Sheridan says in a post on Sega’s website:
“Utomik’s unique and proprietary instant play technology loads games up to 100 times faster than any other service. All games on Utomik can be played lag-free and 100% in the original quality.”
The decision to make a portion of its library available on a service like Utomik reflects the philosophy Sega lived by in the 90s: bigger, faster, better. It was this philosophy that led Sega to one-up Nintendo and create the Sega Genesis, and Sega’s anthropomorphic mascot, Sonic the Hedgehog.
Nowadays, Sega is no longer a part of the console race, but decisions like this one to make a few games from its PC library available on a subscription service quite like Utomik sounds like Sega’s still kind of living up to its philosophy, if only just when it comes to speed. Either way, Sonic would be proud.
