As part of a wide-ranging Famitsu interview with SEGA, president Shuji Utsumi touched upon a number of different topics, including Sonic the Hedgehog.
The Japanese magazine published a lengthy discussion with the executive in this week’s issue. During their talk, Famitsu mentioned that Sonic the Hedgehog plays a pretty big role in the transmedia business.
Utsumi said in response:
“Sonic kind of exists as a symbol for SEGA, if Sonic is doing well, then I think the whole company will do well too. Actually, certain developments were only made possible because the Sonic movie did so well, and we hope to be able to use this and connect it to the success of our other IPs.”
Later in the interview, Famitsu brought up SEGA’s previous fiscal year and how the company struggled a bit. That led Utsumi to share some different thoughts, including how SEGA failed to reach its goal regarding “global development expansion of Sonic related titles” and he hoped that the latest Sonic game would sell more.
Utsumi noted:
“I think last year was pretty tough. As we already talked about, there was the difficulty with Rovio, and we had aimed for global development expansion of Sonic related titles, but didn’t reach our goal. The new Sonic game was well made, and honestly I had wanted it to sell more. Taking those results into account, we are now proceeding with measures to ‘add more selling power to each title’.”
Utsumi didn’t mention a specific Sonic game, but we can assume that he was referring to Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds. SEGA previously said that it was disappointed with the title’s sales. Despite that, there’s a lot still planned for the racer, including DLC with Godzilla and Evangelion.
How are you feeling about Sonic the Hedgehog these days? Let us know in the comments.
Translation provided by Simon Griffin and SatsumaFS on behalf of Nintendo Everything.