SEGA treated Yu-Suzuki terribly imo , with out Suzuki-san they would be no SEGA that man singled handedly made SEGA inthe 80's . You can forget the other staff Yu Szuki was the man and the way SEGA treated him (after one failure ) was horrible and its a loss to SEGA to let that man go
Yeah
Its a loss for Sega to get rid or lose half the talent that they had, there seems to be no ready replacements there at the moment. Its really gone back to the period before the Nakayama period started when Sega was more or less a one man show that became a faceless company churning out games. As much as i admired Nagoshi, it really didn't make sense to make him the one man show of sega when Sega especially after the Nakayama era started was more than a one man show company as what culmilated with the teams in the DC /third party period.
SEGA Japan has a silly tendency to promote people up the ranks based on 1 game or some great bit of code . Naka -san may have been genius coder , but was not a team leader.
Naka-san should have been made head of SEGA technical R&D imo and Yoji Ishii head of the Sonic Team
I wouldn't call it silly to recognise talent but making them go corporate is silly which i agree, many game developers never make good buisness corporate men IMHO i mean look at Hisao Oguchi, he always looked like a fish out of water in that enviroment and the reality is that the corporate side is always going to be a culture shock to the free world of the game developer/programmer etc.