On May 15th 2025, GeekOut officially announced that they are collaborating with SEGA Corporation to bring the Yakuza Universe to the Roblox platform.
Despite progressing towards the official release, the developers have kept everything under wraps for now. This isn’t the first time SEGA has collaborated with others to bring one of their IPs to the world of Roblox.
Roblox is the play-dough for a lot of developers to create their own games, some of which are immensely popular. But that is not all, this platform is also a playground for fan developers who work to create unofficial fan-games out of their favorite IPs like Verse Piece, Sorcery and E.R.P.O.
Other important SEGA collaborations
In 2022, Gamefam, a popular Roblox developer, released Sonic Speed Simulator, a Sonic the Hedgehog experience, officially licensed by SEGA.
The game reportedly had over 70 million plays in its first week, marking it one of the biggest Roblox launches. Thus, it is not surprising that SEGA has a positive approach towards supporting more licensed fan games on the platform.
Even beyond the Roblox platform, SEGA has officially supported fan games. In 2017, the company supported the release of Sonic Mania, which was an incredibly well made 2D Sonic fan game, spearheaded by Christian Whitehead.
The company is no stranger to fan-made projects and has always had a positive outlook towards these titles. Chief Brand Officer for Sonic Studio at SEGA of America, Ivo Gerscovich positively responded towards fan made community projects in an AMA on Reddit.
SEGA continues to support fan games
The Yakuza Roblox game revealed by GeekOut is also a fan game called Kamuro District, as pointed out in the Discord screenshot by resetera user Antoo.
Under the official post announcing the collaboration with GeekOut, several fans made comments expressing the demand for future collaborations with popular IPs like Fortnite and Tekken.
While developers and publishers supporting fan-made creations is a rare sight, it has fueled the demands of community creations for IPs like Yakuza and Persona.
The big question that this situation entails is, “What is the next big SEGA collaboration?” And while the company loves to let fans run with their ideas, they might’ve already nailed down their next collaboration.
Even though Persona is an IP that belongs with Atlus, they are known to indulge in some of the most wild promotional materials when it comes to marketing, including collaborating with heavy metal bands such as SlipKnot.
Atlus, despite being owned by SEGA, does have their own independent network and while they haven’t collaborated with any external video game franchises yet, it would be wrong to rule them out completely.
With SEGA slowly embracing fan-made concepts on multiple platforms, it might be the push that Atlus needs to break the chains around Persona and bring it to other IPs like Fortnite, or to take it other platforms like Roblox!
Developers of the Yakuza franchise have already responded to their fans about Kiryu Kazama being unable to appear in a fighting game because it would go against the character’s code of beating up women, but fans are persistent with their hopes.
What we can expect from SEGA in the future
Just like Capcom, SEGA should try and expand their classic library. Virtua Fighter, Crazy Taxi and Shinobi are already a few IPs that the company is trying to revive internally, but fan-made titles could revive other popular franchises like Panzer Dragon and House of the Dead.
Atlus has been making third-party collaborative efforts with Japanese publisher G-Mode to bring some of their older mobile games to modern platforms, but they remain untranslated for global audiences.
If SEGA and Atlus would expand some of their attention to licensing fan efforts to translate some of the older Persona titles and other games from their catalogue, then that would make a lot of fans happy.
All expectations may actually be fulfilled in the future, looking at SEGA taking the first steps in bringing back games like Virtua Fighter in a big way and with a positive outlook towards fan collaborations.
