Once again, SEGA tried to give Sonic the Hedgehog a kid-friendly image from a Western studio, and once again it failed miserably. The much maligned Sonic Boom managed to sell only 490,000 units, and SEGA doesn't even mention if it was "units shipped" or "units sold."
To make matters worse, that figure includes both the Wii U's Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric and the Nintendo 3DS' Sonic Boom: Shattered Crystal, meaning that the likelihood of the main Wii U game failing to cross 400,000 units sold is pretty high. The game proved to be one of the biggest blunders of last year launching with game breaking bugs and universal thrashings from the critic circles. Now it holds the dubious title as one of the worst selling games in the entire series.
Someone find me the sales figures of recent games that the Sonic fans approve of, like Sonic Generations, and let's compare please! We do have the original Sonic the Hedgehog sitting at a comfortable 15 million units and Sonic 2 sitting at 6 million just for comparison's sake at the height of his popularity. Eurogamer points towards Sonic Colors, a popular one, at a respectable 2.18 million, but mentions that the Wii and Nintendo DS user base was much larger.
It's become painfully obvious that the further SEGA strays from what Sonic's longtime fans want, the more likely the game is to come up short and disappoint everyone.
On the bright side, SEGA can point towards Alien Isolation as a success story with it listed at 1.76 million sales despite the 1 million mark being crossed not even a month ago. Where did that .76 million boost come from?
Overall, SEGA Sammy took a large hit due to the arcade and amusement business decreasing, and the company posted a loss of ¥13 billion (roughly $110 million USD). Sonic Boom might be awful, but you can't blame it for a loss that big.
