Good question, I don't know. That's the problem. If less than 100k on Steam is what Sega considers "strong", I'll expect the next 3d Sonic to have no budget.
No I think Sega would consider under 100k a failure, or at least not strong, especially compared to what Mania seems to have done (which we also don't know officially). Even if they sold the same though, one was much higher acclaimed than the other. I hope they take the right path going forward. You just had your focus group test Sega and you know the results.
Unless Sega is willing to nut up and actually release the sales numbers, this claim of "strong sales" is meaningless. From the info that's been publicly available, Forces had an unspectacular launch and then basically just dropped off the face of the planet afterwards. Mania kept selling and selling for months. I imagine that Forces' actual sales performance looks embarrassing next to Mania (and probably Generations too). Easier to just up and say "it did great lol c'mon we're awesome" than open themselves up to some bad PR.
I've now gotten to the point that I'm really, really curious to try out Forces for myself. But it's not worth the asking price of upwards of £20 that I can find, and I don't want SEGA to see a penny from me for it. I'm waiting until it hits a Humble Bundle or is dirt cheap pre-owned.
Could it be that Forces physical sales were just much stronger than its digital sales? Are they being counted separately? There's no way Forces did 'well' if its not true. It may have been good for par but downloads for Forces were not particularly strong. I never expected Forces to tank but based on what we saw with the digital sales it would be kind of surprising if it did 'well'. And it seems unlikely to me that we'll ever actually know at this point if they don't release numbers at SXSW. I can't imagine them wanting to publicly admit that Mania outperformed it.
Maybe but in a world where Xenoblade 2 has sold over a million in less than a month on a single console, I would expect something with far more name recognition such as Sonic to do similar on 4. Granted X2 is a marginally better game but still. Seems we are at an impass, without solid numbers, we are left spinning our wheels on the matter. That said, back to Xenoblade 2 which I have clocked a good 130 hours.
I'm playing Forces right now and what frustrates me the most is that a lot of this game is actually done well, but not the important parts. Technically it works, it's flashy, it actually looks really good (props to the lighting engine designers it's a very nice looking game), most of the soundtrack is spot on (except for Classic's stuff but I'll get to that in a minute). But the level design and some of the choices they made. Why? And I realize that they redid the level layouts for some of these levels again and again but I place most of the blame on whoever forced Classic Sonic in this game. Everything about Classic Sonic in this game was wrong. Initially when he was revealed I was like, yea, this makes sense. It's fine and safe. But no I was wrong. Classic Sonic was a waste of time and resources. They had to make all new levels for him (and not just layout edits, Classic has his own level geometry, as opposed to Sonic and the Avatar that share some). They had to make new music and it was awful. They tried once again to remake the physics and they didn't do it right. Honestly? This game should have just been tag team stages. Generations style, 9 stages, 2 acts each, 6 bosses, and some SA2 esq challenge missions. Every second they spent working on Classic Sonic was wasted when they could have been putting that time to anything else. If anything I hope Sega realizes that Classic Sonic and Modern Sonic need to be their own thing. No more combo games. It was great in Generations, but in this it seemed like a bunch of ideas that weren't left in the oven long enough. If Sega can learn anything from this and Mania, it's that quality games with focus and care work better than games with a bunch of shit thrown at the wall. Quality, not Quantity.
I've been mostly in agreement with your assessment of Forces but honestly.... since Forces wasn't a good game and it still apparently sold decently, SEGA isn't going to learn anything. They just aren't. They can make whatever they want to make and as long as it isn't a full on train wreck like '06 or Boom, they'll do fine. Can they do much better? Of course. But its hard to see what could motivate them to do so, if games like Mania and Forces are sharing a similar bottom line for the company (IF that's true, which depends on how sales are being counted). ......... Also, while I understand why Modern fans (and many others) want Classic and Modern to be separated, I actually happen to think the logical next step for the franchise given the reality of politics/condition of franchise, would be to tweak the boost engine and fully fix the 2.5D gameplay physics to be close to 1:1 with the classic/Mania. Someone else in here mentioned this weeks ago but with having a mostly 2D gameplay with occasional 3D sections it should be a common sense move to actually polish the 2D gameplay to the original standard, or in this case, Mania's standard. The boost engine with true-to-legacy physics could raise the gameplay potential of these games by a considerable margin and I'd be interested in seeing them do it, since its the one thing they are actually likely capable of with the available talent on hand right now. This isn't even anything close to my dream Sonic game or anything like that; I still want a fully 3D game inspired by the classics. But this would be the quickest path back to success for 3D Sonic in my opinion.
Idk, Forces may have apparently "sold well," but Mania blew them out of the water. They might not admit it, but they're bound to learn something from this game. Learn what I'm not sure, but something. It sold too well and reviewed too well to be ignored, Japanese pride be damned. Besides, Sonic's been the weak link for Sega for years. All their other main franchises seem to be doing fine and they've basically signed off Sonic as a western franchise at this point. Mania was SoA's attempt at a Sonic game and it succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Sega's a business. They may be a Japanese business that's clouded by pride or whatever, but they're going to follow success. Even during the inbetween period of Mania's release and Forces' release Nakamura was talking about how shocking Mania's reception was and how they'd look at that in the future. I work with some pretty stupid people at my job. I would be absolutely shocked if Sega was dumb enough to not see money and follow it. I bet they also know that as far as their home console division goes, a lot of people associate Sega with Sonic. That means they need to meet some kind of quality standards. While I bet Sega's putting on a face, I bet they're furious with Sonic Team for being shown up by a bunch of fan indie developers from the west. Unless they have an ace up their sleeve I imagine Sonic Team is going to be smacked upside the head and reorganized, and that may go all the way to the top (I.E Iizuka, who has been floundering since Sonic Colors with the exception of Generations). Puyo Puyo tetris might save some of their asses but not all of their's. I imagine people are going to be fired from this. EDIT: Side note. Null Space should have had a whole world/area. It's beautiful and it only has 10 seconds devoted to it. Considering the whole area was made out of vaporwave and cubes, it's disgraceful they didn't make more of it.
"Sonic the Hedgehog for XBOX 360 and PS3, Sonic Mega Collection/Plus and catalogue titles sell strongly", ~2007 FY (Reminder that Sonic 2006 sold 870K copies, significantly less than virtually every mainline Sonic game released in its decade and less than certain spinoff titles. Even similarly controversial titles like Shadow the Hedgehog and Unleashed had significantly more sales.)
If anything, this at least gives me hope that Sega's just saving face and that this game wasn't successful enough to emulate in future titles. I hope that's all this is.
True. I was just thinking about this while playing Forces. They've been gun shy about extra characters since 06. This was the first main Sonic game in 11 years to have a non Sonic as a playable character (they've fudged the Sonic definition a bit but still). They can learn, they can even take it too far, but if they get backed into a corner they will make adjustments.
I took a look into some of the other data sheets they have over there, notably the one with Sonic Boom https://www.segasammy.co.jp/english/ir/library/pdf/settlement/2015/2015_4q_presentation_e_v2.pdf In this instance, they didn't bother to differentiate between the handheld and console versions. I think it may be the same here considering Mania placed under "Packaged Games" in the financial reports instead of with the digital games. If this turns out to be the case, they should just say the "Sonic Franchise" performed strongly.
Even if Forces did actually do "well", the likely possibility still remains that Mania outdid it by a significant margin. I don't normally like to make assumptions like this without much proof, but I think the primary reason they aren't giving proper figures for Mania and Forces is because they don't want to show just how much better Mania did, as it would be pretty embarrassing for a mainstream developer like Sonic Team. Either way, we can only hope they take at least some of the critique of Forces to heart, even if those critiques didn't reach them through their wallets.
Idk if this makes more sense here or in the hacking topic, but: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjNXlP89Bfc Unleashed levels look pretty snazzy running on the Hedgehog Engine 2.
Gotta say, pretty impressed by how well Sonic Forces modding is progressing. Figured it'd be more of a dud like Lost World since it's based on that, but I guess it helps that PC version of Forces wasn't released a few years later too.
Yeah I know it's pretty lacking, but at the least I don't seem to remember Lost World hacking reaching this far. That was mostly just some experiments and then it hit a dead end from what I recall. I just thought it was impressive compared to that.
Well the background/skybox and the shadows and lighting aren't configured obviously. I'm impressed that the natural lighting catches the trees and such accordingly, but I imagine that once/if things got figured out, the only reason it wouldn't look as good as Unleashed is due to missing effects and polish.
Huh. Apparently Forces has time overs. Although instead of the usual 10 minutes they give you a whole hour. http://youtu.be/oG4eNpxlAGA?t=7m38s Like I'm surprised they bothered.
