Sonic the Hedgehog’s starting to resemble washed-up boxer Jake LaMotta in the final scene of Raging Bull.
The once-great gaming mascot just pulled in some seriously disappointing sales figures for Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric on the Wii U and Sonic Boom: Shattered Crystal on Nintendo 3DS, which released November 2014. The games only sold 490,000 copies combined, as revealed in Sega’s latest financial report. That makes Sonic Boom the lowest-selling major Sonic titles ever, according to Eurogamer. It’s a low point for Sega’s iconic mascot, whose image used to sell hardware in the great Sega-versus-Nintendo console war of the 1990s.
[aditude-amp id="flyingcarpet" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":1660385,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"games,","session":"B"}']Packed in with the Sega Genesis console, Sonic’s debut title went out to 15 million households. The sequel sold 6 million copies, and more recent spin-offs like Mario & Sonic at the Winter Olympic Games on the Nintendo Wii still performed strongly. Sonic: Lost World, which released on Wii U and Nintendo 3DS back in October 2013, also outperformed Sonic Boom, selling 710,000 copies.
Sonic Boom’s lack of sales success isn’t entirely unexpected given the negative reception it got from game critics. Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric is sitting on a Metacritic score of just 32 out of 100, and user reviews aren’t much better, averaging 3.8 out of 10. Metro awarded the Wii U title just one mark out of 10, saying it is “possibly the worst Sonic the Hedgehog game ever made, which considering some of his previous lows is one of the harshest insults in gaming.”
What Sega decides to do next with its little blue hedgehog will be interesting to see.