During Sega’s latest financial results briefing with investors, the company admitted that Sonic Superstars underperformed at launch, noting the “significant” impact of games launched around the same time by its competitors. While Sega doesn’t name any exact examples when asked by investors, anyone who pays attention to release schedules knows exactly which games are to blame. Sonic Superstars launched on Oct. 17, just a few days before Super Mario Bros. Wonder and Spider-Man 2 both arrived on Oct. 20 and proceeded to dominate the sales charts.
Sonic may be a popular character, but his newest game frankly never stood a chance against Mario or Spider-Man, let alone both of them at the same time. Maybe Sega had its reasons for not pushing it back a month or two but whatever the case, none of the higher-ups should be shocked to see it underperform.
That said, Sega is approaching things with a glass-half-full mindset. Rather than write Sonic Superstars off as an immediate failure, it plans to “expand the promotion towards the holiday season, especially in overseas market.” Sega Sammy Holdings president and group CEO Haruki Satomi even hopes Sonic Superstars will eventually sell as well as Sonic Frontiers.
“Sonic Superstars was released in October, which is a slightly weaker start than we had anticipated,” Satomi said (via VGC). “But in reality, when Sonic IP sells the most is mainly November to December, and more than 90% of this title’s marketing cost will be spent in the Thanksgiving and holiday season from November onwards.”
It’s entirely possible Sonic Superstars will perform better over Christmas now that people have got the Mario and Spider-Man games out of their system, especially with December lacking any monumental releases aside from Ubisoft’s Avatar game. If things don’t improve, though, Sega may need to reassess its plans for future 2D Sonic games to ensure they are more financially successful. Or at the very least pick better release windows for them.
