Sonic Team head: CrossWorlds Season Pass necessary to “secure” continued development

Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds is surprisingly content-packed which has delighted fans of the game with new tracks and characters and events added frequently. In a recent interview Sonic Team head Takashi Iizuka said that Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds Season Pass became a necessary method to fund continued development with the game once sales slowed. He said that the team focussed on the fans first and then the profits second, which he now admits may not necessarily have been the right approach. Here’s what was said:

Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds feels like a game that leans toward the live-service model. Was that the plan from the beginning?

Iizuka: From the beginning, we strongly wanted to make it this way. The Sonic series has a lot of standalone games, but while they tend to generate a lot of excitement immediately after release, after a few months, everyone finishes them and stops playing. However, Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds is an online title, and we wanted people to keep playing it for a long time. To keep players engaged long-term, though, you inevitably need to add new content frequently, or they’ll get bored.

So, how do you keep adding content frequently? Development budgets aren’t unlimited, so you need to recoup those costs. From there, the idea of charging for additional content through a Season Pass came about. The current business model essentially grew out of what we initially wanted to achieve.

From your position as a business producer, are you interested in GaaS (games as a service)?

Iizuka: GaaS is the mainstream model for mobile titles and the like, but it’s not that I specifically wanted to make a GaaS game. Our primary goal was simply to make Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds a game that people would continue playing for a long time.

Having released Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds as a game that’s closer to a live-service title, is there anything you’ve learned from the experience?

Iizuka: Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds started from the question of how we could make people keep playing for a long time, so it was different from the framework of a conventional GaaS title from its inception. Meaning, we started out without thinking all that much about how we would make money from it. In the end, the fact that we could only secure additional development funding through the Season Pass model is something we also see as a lesson learned.

As a player, I do appreciate being able to play for a long time at this price.

Iizuka: We made the plan from the perspective of the fans, and ended up putting profits second… Going forward, I’d like us to find the right balance.