Roles

As with all companies with employees, Sega assigns its workforce with defined roles, allowing it to operate effectively as a business. While many of its job titles are self-evident (e.g. an artist makes art), others are more vague, use terms more commonly seen in Japan, or apply exclusively to Sega. Sega Retro categorises people by some of these roles, so below is a list of general descriptions of what said roles entail.

Creative services

Sega of America and Sega Europe use the term "creative services" to describe "miscellaneous" tasks involved in game development and publishing. Sega has described creative services as including "graphic and digital design, video editing, branding, animation, packaging, event design, concept ideation, illustration, and creative input". What this means in video game terms, is that creative services teams produce content used to promote the game (for example, advertising), but are not involved directly in creating the game itself. They also handle packaging and manuals and other incidental details.

Prior to the introduction of creative services teams, these tasks would be handled by marketing (whose role now is to decide "what" the creative service teams produce), or outsourced to external agencies. The writing of game manuals, for example, is something Sega would typically outsource, because only a limited number of products needing manuals would be relased per year. With the advent of the internet, upcoming products are constantly promoted from the early stages of development, so creative services teams are always needed.

Designers/planners

In Western game development, it is common for a "director" to oversee the development of a product, and "designers" deciding what the finer details of that product should look like (which is then fed through to other areas such as programming or art).

In Japan, "designer" often refers specifically to "graphic design", or what Western developers might call an "artist". This could be because when dealing with limited video game hardware, artists had to be aware of technical limitations, and thus had to "design" their work to accommodate.

Instead, "planners" fulfil the game designing role (with a "chief planner" being an alternative name for director). This can cause confusion; for example, taken at face value, there are no credited artists in Sonic the Hedgehog, as Naoto Ohshima (Bigisland) is credited with "character design", while Jina Ishiwatari (Jinya) and Rieko Kodama (Phoenix Rie) are credited just with "design". However, all three are artists who produced art for the game; Hirokazu Yasuhara (Carol Yas), credited for "game plan", decided how objects should function, and created the level layouts.

In more recent years, planner/designer has begun to give way to designer/artist, with the two sets of terms being interchangable as far back as the early 1990s.