Sonic and the secret rings sales in the u.s are under 250k, despite being regarded critically as the best 3d sonic game, its performed poorly, in comparison to the cubes sonic adventure 2 battle which did over a million in the u.s alone.  can Sega stay afloat on poor offerings like this and even more disappointing sales of other next gen titles like Virtua Fighter 5.

I sure hope not. I enjoyed Secret Rings. All the reviews are correct, in that it is extremely frustrating. But the sense of accomplishment was great. As for the sales, it could be for 2 reasons: 1) People gave up hope on the Sonic Name 2) Fans, though disapointed with 3D platformer, would have enjoyed That more than the on-rails experience.

Edit: I agree, sales could still go up in the future, especially with a larger install base.

Not dead but on life support like the rest of Sega's franchises. They need to swallow some pride and get a good strong publisher. Any of the big three would do an excellent job taking them on as a second party, and most large publishers would be happy to publish their games (EA notwithstanding).

I only enjoyed Soninc in 2D... 3D kinda killed it for me..

 It really hasn't been out that long, and it's still moving some decent numbers. I imagine it will move many more units over the course of the Wii's lifespan.

As for the future of Sega. It seems like they're forming some strong bonds with Nintendo. Mario and Sonic at the Olympics should do quite well, NiGHTS might be one of their biggest releases in some time, and they're probably making a pretty penny off of all their VC releases.

I think the same thing happened to the Sonic franchise as what happened to Sega's consoles.  The crap killed any chance of the good stuff from succeeding as much as it should have.  Take the Dreamcast console, it was a well designed system, but was hindered by past bad decisions made with other Sega consoles.  The new Sonic game, some people will assume it's just the same as some of the crap Sega released in the franchise.

I heard that the recent Sonic game for xBox 360 and PS3 was awful becuase of the horrible camera angle, but apparently the one coming out for the Wii is meant to be better.

 I think they should let Shiggy direct a Sonic game, he might be able to breathe new life into the franchise

I'm not expecting much out of Nights. Dreamcast did well. They just didn't have the money to sustain it.

I still hope it makes the million w/w, i think it sold very well in europe and it will have some legs in america aswell.