About 70 percent of Sega's video game sales last year came from the overseas market, according to Xtrend, and one of the forces driving this popularity is the Sonic franchise. In fact, according to the list of updated sales published by Sega — and reported on by VideoGamesChronicle — the IP has accumulated total sales of 1.5 billion units sold through the last fiscal year ending in March 2022.
VGC owes a lot of this success to Sonic's portable titles, mainly the ones released after 2013 such as Sonic Dash, Sonic Runners, Sonic Dash 2: Sonic Boom, and Sonic Runners Adventures. This big number includes the sales garnered from these endless runner games and their microtransactions, in addition to Pachinko (arcade) slots in Japan. VGC strengthens its point by including the download numbers of Sonic Dash, which had already surpassed half a billion downloads as of 2021, and Sonic Speed Battle, which has cleared 94 million downloads as of April this year. It appears that the future of the Sonic franchise lies in the free-to-play market, but Xtrend might have different thoughts regarding the matter.
Xtrend (or Nikkei Crosstrend) is a popular digital marketing news outlet in Japan, and in an article it published this week, it attributed Sonic's particular success in the United States to the power of its design and the sense and energy of "coolness" the titular character radiates. The Hollywood Sonic series' first movie has surpassed $149 million in box office revenue in the US, making it the highest-grossing film based on a video game in North America. Additionally, games like Shadow the Hedgehog were already made with a western appeal in mind, not to mention the incorporation of western comic writers into the franchise's future canon, such as Ian Flynn.
These results are not at all surprising, since the head of Sonic Team Takashi Iizuka has gone to America to establish a centralized hub for the series there. Sonic's 1.5 billion success can be ascribed to the vehement change in market approach and western appeal. Furthermore, director Mario Kishimoto revealed to Game Informer that he has rewritten much of the script of the upcoming Sonic Frontiers in Japanese to suit Japan's audience, hinting at how Sonic's image in Frontiers was carefully assembled with a western audience in mind, and even foreign musicians will be on board for the first time, according to head composer Tomoya Ohtani, to double down on the approach towards western appeal.
In reflection of these points, it's natural for Sonic as an IP to have accumulated such a success thanks to the mobile titles and the radical shift in direction towards the US, and Iizuka is already gearing up for the next game — and the next 10 years of Sonic's lifetime — after he establishes the Open Zone as the primary driving force behind the future of the IP with Frontiers.