Sonic Boom bombs big

Sonic Boom bombed at the box office, which should come as no surprise to anybody who’s seen or played it. Last year’s biggest stinker managed to sell just 490,000 copies across both the Wii U and 3DS. That’s good news if you’re an indie developer, bad if you’re a multi-billion dollar corporation.

Alien Isolation, one of last year’s stronger games, did manage to sell 1.76 million copies across all platforms. Football Manager, a long time European favourite, sold 640,000 copies.

Breaking things down further, Sega only pushed 270,000 games on the Wii U total across last quarter, and 320,000 for the year. That puts Sonic Boom’s results in a more dismal light, since it’s not the only game the company sells on the platform.

Sega has seen their net sales drop 20% over the last quarter of 2014, while profits have decreased a staggering 93% to $17.16 million. A couple of bright spots include the company’s mobile and pachinko businesses, which are expected to show strong growth in 2015. Proving that gambling is always a recession-proof business.

Hopefully this will be a wake up call to others in the industry. Releasing mediocre and incomplete games is bad for business.

Source: Sega (1) (2) (3)
Image: Clip from Sonic Boom TV series, copyright Sega, used under fair use