Once the dismal reviews started to pour in, no one thought that Sonic Boom would sell many copies, but it was not expected to be this bad. Sega Sammy, parent company of the developer/publishing company Sega, revealed that the latest game from the blue blur sold a mere 490k copies across 3DS and Wii U consoles.
As Polygon noted, those abysmal sales number are even lower than another recent 3DS/Wii U exclusive Sonic game, Sonic: Lost World, which sold only 640k in its first quarter. Also in similar time periods, Sonic Generations and Sonic Colors sold 1.63 million and 1.85 million copies respectively. Generations was released on four platforms (Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo, PC), but Sonic Colors was a Wii/3DS exclusive similar to Sonic Boom. It may be easy to point to console exclusivity as a reason for lower sales, but the bigger reason is that the game is a total mess.
Prior to its release, Sonic Boom took the dreaded route of not letting reviewers get their hands on the game early, leading to fears that it wasn’t going to continue Sonic’s recent trend of above-average games. Shortly after its release, fears were confirmed and social media exploded with comparisons to Sonic 2006 in terms of its poor quality and general amount of brokenness. YouTube videos quickly went up displaying just how broken the game truly was, and since then it has been nothing but downhill for Sonic Boom on Wii U and 3DS.
While a total bust on consoles, Sonic Boom still keeps pushing on in cartoon form where it airs on Cartoon Network. There is also a monthly Sonic Boom comic published by Archie comics.
Perhaps the best thing to come out of Sonic Boom has been the hilarious jump glitch (since patched) that let players pause the game in the middle of one characters jump animation and restart the animation. This allowed players to skip huge chunks of the game and complete it in a matter of a couple hours. Alan Denton, one of the writers on the Sonic Boom cartoon, jokingly tweeted that the glitched jump “is now canon,” which lead to one fan making a great video putting it seamlessly into the show.
It’s not all doom and gloom for Sega however, as the company’s Alien: Isolation sold an impressive 1.76 million copies across several consoles and won many Game of the Year awards. A new content pack was also recently added to Alien: Isolation, which adds more Salvage Challenges to the game.
[button type=”link” link=”http://www.polygon.com/2015/2/12/8029245/sonic-boom-sales-sega-losses” variation=”btn-danger” target=”blank”]Source: Polygon[/button]
Last Updated on November 27, 2018.
