SEGA has revealed the lifetime sales of the Sonic the Hedgehog video game series and total sales of Sonic escapades have now surpassed 1.5 billion. Sales are expected to rise dramatically with the release of the new 3D sonic adventure, Sonic Frontiers, which releases on 8th November. Sonic’s rise to fame began with his first game, Sonic the Hedgehog, which was released to critical acclaim on the SEGA Mega Drive in 1991. Sales for the Sonic the Hedgehog video games were at 1.38 billion units sold last year. Here’s the top ten most popular SEGA franchises, as of October 2022:
- Sonic the Hedgehog: 1.51bn
- Total War: 40.4m
- Puyo Puyo: 37.7m
- Football Manager: 25m
- Yakuza: 19.8m
- Virtua Fighter: 18.8m
- Shin Megami Tensei: 19m
- Hatsune Miku: 18.5m
- Persona: 15.5m
- Phantasy Star: 9.8m
||“sales are expected to rise dramatically”, more like sales are expected to plummet dramatically if the game continues the sonic cycle… ||
XD
Im more impressed with Yakuza can’t wait until Like A Dragon Ishin releases. Also impressed that Phantasy Star New Genesis 2 got a western release and it’s F2p.
Wow, Sonic isn’t just number one, it actually obliterates the rest of Sega’s franchises in terms of profitibility. No wonder they tend to put all of their eggs in that basket. Seems arguable whether this is actually a good thing since you would expect a company like Sega to maintain a healthy diversity of high profile franchises to keep growing
And here we have multiple sources noting the Mario franchise as the best selling franchise of all time with only ~775 million copies sold. Something seems fudged about these numbers. Are we talking $1 mobile sales as a “sold” copy of Sonic the Hedgehog?
Well this is just depressing, seeing such great series such as Shin Megami Tensei, Persona, Yakuza and Phantasy Star doing so poorly compared to Sonic is heart breaking. Also, that is a ridiculously high number, it almost seems like SEGA just pulled that number out of nowhere.
In fact, I’m 100% calling BS, even all the Pokemon games haven’t sold half a billion between them.
Supposedly Sonic 1 on the Genesis has sold 44 million copies. I’m assuming they’re counting ports and the like, so it kinda makes sense that Sonic 1 sold more than any Pokemon game since it has had a lot of releases whereas Pokemon RBY had only two releases. It does seem suspicious that the Sonic franchise has 1.1 billion more releases than the Pokemon franchise though. Where are all of these numbers coming from?
Sales of free digital downloads and mobile games from Sonic should be on a separate list, and not mixed with that number imo.
Something about these Sega IPs sales overall feels suspicious. I mean I’m a VF fan but I’m still surprised it appearently sold more than Shin Megami Tensei: and Persona.