sega-of-america posts

On Monday it was revealed that Simon Jeffery, the long time president of Sega of America, had decided to leave the company in order to join the iPhone game publishing company ngmoco. Now Gameindustry.biz is reporting that Jeffrey's replacement has already been named.

According to their story Mike Hayes, previously the chief operating officer of Sega Europe, has now been named as the new president for Sega of America. Hayes gets named to his new post as Sega preps up a number of game titles for the next 12 months including Alpha Protocol and Aliens Vs Predator for the PC platform.

Changes are coming for one of the biggest game publishers in the US. A press release from iPhone-iPod Touch game publisher ngmoco has announced that they have brought in Simon Jeffery to be its chief publishing officer. Jeffrey was previously the president and chief operating officer at Sega of America.

Jeffrey came to Sega in 2003 after being President of LucasArts. During his tenure Sega began to release more PC games including the PC exclusive titles like the current best selling RTS game Empire: Total War (made by Sega owned developer The Creative Assembly). When contacted by Big Download, a spokesperson for Sega for America would not comment on Jeffery's departure, saying that more news would be revealed later this week.

The latest bad financial news from the gaming industry comes from Sega. The Japan-based publisher just announced its latest numbers and the results are not good. In fact they are bad enough that the company has announced plans to lay off 560 of its worldwide employees (Sega has about 3,100 employees). The company will record a loss of over $235 million, according to Kotaku.

A few weeks ago, it was reported that Sega's US branch had laid off 30 of its employees (A spokesperson later confirmed there were layoffs but would not confirm specific numbers). The new press release states that in order to save costs, Sega will cut 20 percent off its research and development budget which likely means a number of upcoming games could be canceled.

The current economic hardships are continuing to impact the game industry. Today IGN is reporting through unnamed sources that 30 team members of Sega of America have been laid off today. There's no word on what specific people or positions were affected and also no word if the layoffs will affect the releases of Sega's future games.

Also, Gamasutra is reporting that EA's Tiburon studio, home of many of their EA Sports games, has also been affected by layoffs although there is no word from that media outlet exactly how many staffers have been let go. EA has not yet commented on specific layoffs at their various studios, saying only they have plans to cut 10 percent of their workforce.

Update: Edge Online has confirmed with a Sega spokesperson that the layoffs did indeed occur but would not offer more details.