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.

Testers

Since the early 1990s, Sega has operated its own internal testing teams, whose purpose is to "test" products and feed back to the development staff. As a console platform holder, Sega of America operated a very large testing department, not just to cover its own products, but third-party developers hoping to produce products for Sega's systems. The existince of a test team was vital to ensure that software would ship with as few bugs as possible, and that any potential issues could be addressed before the customers discovered them.

Some groups have more say in how a product is changed than others. In video game terms, traditionally a tester's job is to play the game and report any problems that might manifest, however others test for specific features, for example making sure the content of the game adheres to the publisher's guidelines. Examples might include ensuring every Sega Saturn game implements the software reset, or that there isn't too much violence or nudity to meet a specific age rating.

Sega (and others) have used numerous terms to describe these roles, from simply "tester" to "compliance" and "standards", often grouped under a wider "quality assurance" (QA) banner. Testers can range from people pulled off the street with no prior experience in gaming, to those who test games for a living. Developers will also be testing their work during the development process; the dedicated testing teams exist to spot the bugs developers missed (often with extreme edge cases that which the programmers don't have the time to test themselves).

Sega Retro treats localisation testing (e.g. making sure that an English-produced product can be converted to something more suitable for French audiences) under the wider banner of "localisation", because it is difficult to determine who is actually translating content, and who is testing and reacting to content already translated.

Reportedly the release of the Sega Game Gear version of Evander Holyfield's 'Real Deal' Boxing prompted all future games to credit their testers in-game, which, in Sega of America's case, usually amounted to dozens of people. At the time it was unusual at the time to acknowledge such roles, but became widespread as the 1990s drew to a close. A handful of Sega's "permanent" testers were promoted over the years to producer status.

Mastering

Related to the wider testing process, Sega uses the term "mastering technicians" (that sometimes work in a "mastering lab") to describe the role of managing the testing process; for example, setting up a game so that is in a testable state, and collating the feedback for other parts of the business. It is assumed the term comes from the music industry, where audio recordings were "mastered" (e.g. removing background noise, checking volume levels were correct, etc.) prior to release. The main difference being while problems may be indentified, it is the development teams' job to fix them.