SEGA is proceeding with a bigger budget for future Sonic games, following the huge success of Sonic Frontiers.
SEGA has confirmed that Sonic Frontiers has “greatly exceeded” the company’s sales expectations. Moving forward, SEGA says that it will be “proceeding with a bigger budget, even from the basic research stage.”
During a recent investor Q&A (via Reddit), SEGA discussed numerous points related to the critical reception of Sonic Frontiers, the number of units sold, and how the company intends on handling future projects. SEGA said it was aware of the overall Metacritic score being slightly lower than expected for Sonic Frontiers, but the user score was very high. The company said it believes it can “build more repeat sales of Sonic Frontiers through pricing, discounts and the recently announced DLC.”
SEGA then went on to discuss the sales of Sonic Frontiers, stating that “the number of units sold greatly exceeded our original estimation.” Then, when asked if SEGA intends to commit to large-scale projects like Sonic Frontiers in the future, a spokesperson for the company said, “We expect development costs for new titles to grow even larger in the future.”
“Since it is necessary to take on these challenges for major titles, we are proceeding with a bigger budget, even from the basic research stage. Therefore, we assume that development costs for future new titles will increase accordingly, ” SEGA went on to confirm.
Sonic Frontiers was released for the PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, and PC back in November of 2022. Its Metacritic scores vary depending on the platform but was received positively by fans on all platforms. For the PlayStation 5 version of Sonic Frontiers, its Metacritic score is 71, but has an 8.2 out of 10 user score for the platform.
Shortly after its release, SEGA released the official 2023 content roadmap for Sonic Frontiers, confirming that new modes, playable characters, challenges, and more would be released throughout the year. The new content will be split across three free updates, with the final patch set to include new playable characters and a brand-new story.
