Future Sonic games will have larger budgets thanks to Sonic Frontiers’ success

Sonic Frontiers’ success has pushed SEGA to invest more in the franchise

Sonic Frontiers released last year with praise from both sonic fans and critics alike. While the game was not universally praised, it proved to SEGA that Sonic games could be hugely successful, so much so that SEGA plans to increase the development budgets of future games, even during their early research phases.

In under two months, Sonic Frontiers has already sold over 2.9 million units, and SEGA expects a lot more copies of the game to sell over the coming months. With Sonic Frontiers, SEGA gave the game’s development team the time needed to create a game that was larger in scope than prior Sonic titles, allowing Sonic Frontiers to play differently than older 3D Sonic games. 

During a recent investor Q&A session, as translated by Tails Channel, SEGA has confirmed that they will be focusing on creating “solid quality” titles for their existing franchises, and that they will be “proceeding with a bigger budget” for future games. A lot of these cost will be absorbed by increased labour costs (employee wages), as is expected when inflation is high, and games receive more development time.

    We expect development costs for new titles to grow even larger in the future.

We will strive to ensure solid quality in the development of major titles from our existing franchises. However, development labour costs will rise due to the impact of the global external environment, and we expect this trend to continue for the foreseeable 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.

Regardless of your opinions on Sonic Frontiers, SEGA’s commitment to giving their games that time and budget that developers need is a good sign for both the future of Sonic and the future of SEGA. Sonic Frontiers proved that Sonic Team and the Sonic franchise had what it takes to be successful, all they needed was enough development time and a healthy budget. 

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