Sonic Superstars: A New 2D Sonic Game (Fall 2023)

From what I've seen/heard, this skin isn't available on PC.... So I'm saving money by not going to iHop! It's just like the Kroger rewards for the comic book skins DLC...

 

Kroger had one too, and still might, but it was locked behind their reward program and wasn't advertised at all. You had to spend around $40 to get it, which isn't much considering its a grocery store and I easily spend more there than that when reupping the kitchen, but still pretty annoying for a lot of people.

Superstars in general has been a game SEGA seems to be seeing how much they can get out of a smaller budget title and these DLC's that they probably got million dollar deals to have for just skins are probably extremely profitable.

 

Yeah, I saw that in the post just after mine. Is it just Kroger exactly, or do Kroger's subsidiaries count too?

 

You could do it through Fred Meyer, at least. Not sure about any of the others.

 

Those comic skins are not part of the Kroger rewards program anymore. As of now there's no way to get them.

 

As a gay man that enjoys Hooters for the food, those are fighting words!

Anyway, where is that OST? Are they delaying it so it can come out new and improved as a patch or DLC at the same time??

 

Region locked....

Lol.

 

Well like I said, it's what I heard. I still want to visit the States at some point just so I can indulge in the beautiful scenery and heart-stopping food, but that's for the future.

And yeah I honestly expect them to update the game at some point if only to fix the soundtrack. Maybe even the bosses while we're at it. Those seem like the most obvious things to improve, though I wouldn't expect a Mania Plus-esque expansion as Superstars doesn't seem to have done as well.

 

It was Kroger and the Comic Skin, but at least that one let you earn points by playing word games everyday for about two weeks.

It's actually a really nice skin so I do hope it's made widely available in the future.

Edit: For whatever reason I couldn't see the other posts before I made this one. Whups. Please disregard and/or/trash.

Well I guess I can contribute by adding that I also think it's curious how there's been nothing about an OST release just yet, it makes me wonder if they're "up to something" in a way.

 

This game’s DLC is a fucking joke.

 

I mean it's all skins. Easy to make and market to potential partners. Problem is the base game isn't superb enough to drive hype for gold horse armor.

 

Nah, this game's DLC is a joke. Right from the off, the Digital Deluxe edition/add-on includes included overpriced skins and a "mini digital soundtrack", which itself is nothing but a stripped down soundest option that you would typically see in Sonic games by default. There's also the shit with the Lego skins, which are unpurchaseable early adoption purchases.

The commercial reception of Frontiers, and the continued successes of the movies and Prime seem to have inflated SEGA's ego. Superstars, howevrr much I may like it personally, is not the same value for money as Frontiers or almost any other game of the same price point. But SEGA saw fit to price then the same and include a slew of extra purchase incentives to boot. They released it at the same time as incredibly stiff competition and then expressed that sales didn't meet expectations. Superstars is not worth £60 in quality or in content. It's also not worth chasing all these skin distributions that are fractured across a hundred different retailers.

Superstars is a budget game that SEGA think they can get away with some shady "AAA" practices for. I can't hate on Arzest or the game itself when SEGA are the ones pulling the strings and making it into something worse than it really is.

Skins aren't a big deal. But this is bad practice from SEGA. Frontiers was SEGA hoping for the best, and Superstars was SEGA being cocky AF.

 

Just to piggyback on this, I also saw something in their FAQ indicating that birthday coins are delivered on the first of each month. So maybe might need to set the birthday to May 1st to get these.

 

Big agree here. It was kind of crazy seeing the work people put in to disprove claims that Superstars was a flop, only for SEGA to say it was underperforming...because it wasn't the blowout that Frontiers was.

It speaks to the total absurd ineptitude of shareholders and executives to say "well this one Sonic game sold three million copies, so if we just put out ANOTHER game, it should ALSO sell three million" without considering fucking anything about the context and scope of the release. Superstars ain't even bad, but it might be the biggest victim of SEGA's corporate policy I've ever seen.

Hey assholes! If you want the game to be like Frontiers, how about you put out three good patches for the game like that one got? We've handed you the same list of requests a bazillion times since it came out, where's the movement?

 

I like Superstars more than most people here but yeah they were way in over their head trying to position this at $60, and ofc it launching next to fucking Mario Wonder at the same price didnt help.

Even disregarding what you think of the quality of Superstars, it should be obvious to most people that a fairly short 2D platformer should not be as highly priced as a 3D open world game with 10x more content that released just before it, but SEGA saw Frontiers' success and decided it meant all Sonic games should be $60 regardless of length or genre. This game couldve been an easy hit if it had just launched at $30 right out of the gate instead of $60.

 

I'll at least say that I don't think that Superstars was a "flop", but it greatly depends on your definition of the term (and SEGA's, ultimately). Superstars probably sold adquately by average measures and I'd guess that it's turned a relatively decent profit. But SEGA set their expectations way too high, thinking that they could get away with minimum input and maximum output.

That's just my almost baseless guesswork though. The Boom games? Flop. Superstars? Did alright, but alright isn't enough for even publishers want AAA performance.

 

So the IHOP thing isn't an April Fool's joke?!

 

I mean, if even The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog wasn't (even though it was)...

 

It most certainly was not a flop. I don't know how you can think a game made clearly on the cheap and selling within the 1m to 2m units range a "flop".

Blue Blood is right on the money that SEGA is riding some sort of high. This game was over priced and over forecasted. SEGA made money off this, but they most likely wanted to make way more using nothing more than brand recognition without putting any money into the game. The crap they said about upping the quality of Sonic games was all talk. All they've done is out sourced other low budget projects to give Sonic Team more time to push out another mid game.

 

The thing with this game, when they announced it, it never looked like a Mania 2.

They certainly pushed it as that initially but everybody saw through it.

Then they pushed it as a "Ok it's not Mania 2! It's a Co-Op adventure! Better with friends!!!"

Now... we can discuss the final quality of this game for years... We can debate if it deserves any paid DLC, or if you should buy it... But... There is an audience for this game, and there is some interest for it...

And for some reason, Sega have totally missed the thing people were actually interested and excited about for about this game. Once they showed you could wear costumes/change the character skins, that right there was the hook! It's the easiest thing in the world to keep people talking about this game, every few months, release a new costume/skin pack.

I honestly expected every few months we'd see costume packs, just to keep people talking about the game.

They even sort of had a shrewd yet oddly compromised consumer business model for this. Remember the Lego Skins? Eggman was effectively 'free', but the rest were paywalled (Retailer exclusive lolz), but you can see the idea here, you give players 1 character free, but they have to pay for the full set. It's not great for the consumer, but it offers them some free content and then 'oh you want the full set? that'll be $2-$5.' Maybe you could even have some kind of in-game currency store as an unlockable option. Tie it into the... oh lord... Multiplayer mode, you now have an eco-system of support for that mode from players who want to unlock the content for free.

And the crazy thing here, they literally already have a game doing this that works! Sonic Dash! Look at the reaction and cheers that game gets when a new costume drops!

But so far we have "Oh gamble this fictional currency for a chance to win a code", "Oh go eat some pancakes for a code!" "What's that these codes are region locked!?"

And for a second I did think "Well maybe IHOP can't have the Amy skin worldwide due to some odd licensing...." BUT WAIT! If you look at the costume, there's no IHOP branding on it, it's just Amy wearing a blue dress! Does IHOP have a hold on... OHHHH!!



There is absolutely no reason why the IHOP costume should be region locked.

But look at all the other costumes there have been, is there any way to get them all on a single account without resorting to 1: Piracy (lolz) or 2: Living in a specific country?