A 54-year-old man from Toyokawa, Japan, was arrested on March 16 after sending numerous death threats to SEGA.
As reported by Kotaku, the suspect, Akira Watanabe, is accused of sending a dozen separate threatening emails between Dec. 2021 and Feb. of this year. Allegedly, Watanabe's threats ranged from arson to murder, claiming he would "set the company on fire," "kill employees," and even said he would "kill the family and children of employees."
Watanabe apparently sent these threats through SEGA's corporate contact form using his cell phone. At this time, he is only charged for obstruction of a business and has confessed to sending the emails. According to Watanabe, he sent them after becoming upset due to losing in an online game, apparently saying he was "frustrated." Local police have yet to release which game Watanabe played, and so far, SEGA has not commented on the incident.
The emails envoke similar threats to Japanese media companies over the last few years. Back in 2020, authorities arrested a teenager for threatening to bomb Konami for similar reasons to Watanabe, stating he kept losing a Pro Evolution Soccer game due to a bug. Perhaps the best known and most shocking is the arson attack on Kyoto Animation on July 18, 2019, which ultimately claimed the lives of 36 employees and injured a further 33. In that case, no motive for the attack was ever established. However, some speculation pointed to a man by the same name submitting a failed draft during one of Kyoto Animation's many fan submission contests.
This is not the only case of SEGA attracting the ire of players recently, though this is by far the most violent. Last year, disgruntled players filed a class-action lawsuit against SEGA for its notoriously tricky skills-based game Key Master. Players accused the company of rigging the game against them, making it a game of chance rather than skill. Although SEGA no longer officially listed the game on its site and replaced it with Prize Locker games--and even began selling conversion kits to allow players to turn Key Master into a 100% skills-based game--lawyers claimed SEGA continued to still advertise the game as one of skill despite proof of it being one of chance.
This was not the first case of a lawsuit against SEGA for its Key Master game. In 2013, C. Stuart Brown sued SEGA, but U.S. District Judge Richard Berman threw it out for administrative reasons. Another lawsuit by the State of Arizona in 2019 claimed Key Master functioned more like slot machines, which are only allowed in licensed casinos.
Source: Kotaku