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Forums - Nintendo - Sonic Boom $20m budget

Mr Khan on 26 February 2014
Yakuzaice said:
Mr Khan said:
pezus said:
Mr Khan said:

Sonic's been low-tier, but consistent. Certainly more reliable than anything else Sega has in its stable.


Not true. Their PC franchises are their biggest earners...and consistently too. Let's not forget Yakuza either

Yakuza is of niche appeal compared to Sonic. The PC games are a better point, and probably a boon to Sega's balance sheet, but is there room for growth there?

Yakuza is certainly more niche, but I don't see how Sonic is more consistent or reliable.

Sonic games/skus/sales

2007: 4 / 4 / 13.13m
2008: 4 / 8 / 11.57m
2009: 2 / 3 / 8.82m   (if we count the genesis collection 3 / 5 / 11.96)
2010: 4 / 8 / 8.99m
2011: 2 / 5 / 6.82m
2012: 2 / 6 / 2.45m
2013: 2 / 3 / 0.77m

Now obviously this is somewhat tilted towards earlier years since those games had more time to sell, but I don't think breaking every game down by yearly sales would make the trend look significantly different.  The only consistency I see is decline.  Now those early years were also helped significantly by the olympic and racing games, but despite the low numbers, the same is true of the recent years.

Yakuza has also declined since the PS2 games, but it hasn't seen the massive drop that Sonic games have.  It is especially more reliable if we are looking at Japanese sales of the mainline games.  It has only fluctuated between 591k-838k across 5 games over 8 years.  Even the spinoffs seem pretty consistent.  357k for Kenzan, 423k for Dead Souls, and with ~220k first week for Ishin it'll probably fall in a similar range.

They could be more profitable too, come to that.

We can all agree that without Sonic, Sega really doesn't have any mainstream presence though, right? The PC games are certainly there, but don't generate a lot of buzz.



Monster Hunter: pissing me off since 2010.

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Yakuzaice on 26 February 2014
Mr Khan said:

They could be more profitable too, come to that.

We can all agree that without Sonic, Sega really doesn't have any mainstream presence though, right? The PC games are certainly there, but don't generate a lot of buzz.

If they are going forward with $20m budgets and are unable to reverse their sales trajectory they certainly won't be more profitable.  Especially if they don't get those sales till it drops in price.  Sonic Lost World is currently $30 on Amazon, and was available for that price as early as mid December.  In comparison Yakuza is frontloaded with high Japanese prices.

Yakuza 5 sold ~360k at 8800 yen.  Even at todays exchange rates that would be the equivalent of 1.03m units of Lost World sold at $30.  If the Yen were to get back to where it was on Dec 8th, 2012 (launch date of Yakuza 5) it would be equivalent to 1.28m copies at $30 in the US.

What exactly is mainstream presence in the current gaming climate and how valuable is it?  Total War: Rome II hit 800k shipped as of Sept 30th.  That is 25% more than Lost World shipped across the Wii U and 3DS through the end of December.   Football Manager 13 hit 940k. Massive games like League of Legends, World of Tanks, DOTA 2, Crossfire, etc get very little exposure on video game websites/forums compared to the average console release.  Rust sold a million copies in 2 months, and apparently just passed $30 million in revenue which would imply about 500k in the last half month.  There doesn't seem to be a single thread on it here on VGC, and barely any discussion on DayZ. 

If PC games aren't generating buzz, then maybe the buzz isn't very useful.