Right now, there’s a lot of hope in regards to the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise. After all, the movies have done very well, the Sonic Prime anime is coming out on Netflix and looks to be interesting based on the first glance, and people are indeed talking about the next mainline Sonic title via Sonic Frontiers. The people at SEGA even said previously that they hope that this game “sets the stage” for the next 20 years of Sonic.
However, this is where things get tricky, because at an investor Q&A meeting, the heads of SEGA were asked about Sonic Frontiers and its goals. Including whether it had “review score goals” in terms of metacritic.
“We have set internal targets, as the correlation between the scores of external evaluation organizations and sales is high in Europe and North America,” said CEO Haruki Satomi and CFO Koichi Fukazawa.
“If the game gets a high score, it can become a must-buy game, and possibly generate synergy with sales, so we are currently working hard to improve the quality of the game toward its sales for the holiday season.”
That’s…a dangerous path to go on. Because while it is true that review scores can influence a game…it’s not the only deciding factor. What’s more, as proven by both games and movies, critics could like something, but then those who actually buy the titles might not. Granted, they did say they’re “improving the quality of the game”, but hopefully it’s in a way that pleases fans and not just critics.
