Sonic sales disappoint as Sega plans ‘four major new titles’ in next 12 months

Sonic sales disappoint as Sega plans ‘four major new titles’ in next 12 months

Sonic grinding on a rail in a still from Sonic Frontiers.
Another new Frontier for Sonic? (Sega)

Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds, Sonic Rumble, and several other Sega games have fallen below sales expectations, as the company promises a big year to come.

Sonic The Hedgehog might be a hot property in Hollywood, but his most recent video games have failed to reach Sega’s sales expectations.

Both Sonic Rumble and Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds were released in 2025, and while they aren’t considered mainline entries, Sega clearly had higher hopes for them, as made evident in its latest financial report covering the period from October to December 2025.

Sega more broadly states that ‘both new titles and repeat sales performed below expectations’ across all its full price games. During this period, Sega launched two full price games, in Persona 3 Reload on the Nintendo Switch 2 and Football Manager 26.

Elsewhere, Sega highlights free-to-play title Sonic Rumble as having fallen ‘short of expectations’ on ‘various KPIs, particularly customer acquisition’. In a prior report, the company said the ‘initial performance’ of Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds ‘did not meet our expectations’.

If it was a somewhat dry period for Sega, the company is planning ‘to release four major new titles for mainstay IPs’ before the end of the next financial year, aka March 31, 2027.

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While Sega doesn’t state what these specific games are, or what it classifies as a ‘mainstay IP’, you can deduce some of them. Persona 4 Revival is perhaps the most concrete, as it has already been announced and is expected to come out this year.

Total War: Warhammer 40,000 is yet to be dated but, unlike the more distant Medieval 3, there is a chance it’ll be released this year.

There’s also Stranger From Heaven from Like A Dragon developer Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio, but it’s unclear if it’s connected to the Yakuza universe, so this might not fall under the ‘mainstay IP’ bracket.

As such, the other most reliable assumption is a major Sonic game, which is most likely to be a sequel to 2022’s Sonic Frontiers. This has been rumoured for some time, and at this point, some kind of announcement feels overdue.

The other possibilities are the planned reboots of classic games Sega previously announced in 2023. At the time, Sega promised new entries for Shinobi, Jet Set Radio, Crazy Taxi, Streets Of Rage, and Golden Axe, and yet we’ve only had one so far, in Shinobi: Art Of Vengeance.

Additionally, we know a sequel to Alien: Isolation is in development, although it sounds like that’ll be a few years off yet, so is not what was being referenced in the report.

Beyond games, Sega is planning to release various movies and TV shows based on its IP. These include Sonic The Hedgehog 4, OutRun starring Sydney Sweeney, a Golden Axe animated series, a House Of The Dead movie, a Streets Of Rage movie, and films based on Shinobi and Eternal Champions.

Shinobi sliding on a rope in Shinobi: Art Of Vengeance
Shinobi’s comeback made a splash (Sega)

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