The last two games will be sales behemoths, so Frontiers is going up against titans. This year, Sega is going big time in betting on Sonic Frontiers against Skull and Bones, God of War: Ragnarok, and Pokemon Scarlet and Violet. While it did see some level of success with Heroes, Unleashed, and even Colors, ’06 and Forces fell extremely short of the promises their respective marketing cycles gave. At one point, Sega was successful in releasing mainline Sonic titles during the busy holiday months, but that gamble has not paid off in 20 years. It’s not clear if that gamble will pay off. This isn’t a throwaway installment of the series it’s a big, important one you won’t want to miss. While the game has gotten some mixed buzz (we weren’t sure what to make of it when we played it at Summer Game Fest), Sega’s marketing campaign is sending a strong message to fans. Unlike Sonic Forces, Sega seems confident it has a hit on its hands here. That was followed up by the announcement of a full-priced release and a very competitive holiday launch date. With a more cautious approach, Sega would wait for a more coordinated content blowout with previews on IGN First and a public demo at Gamescom 2022. There was radio silence from Sega about the game between the teaser trailer on the May 2021 Sonic Central stream and its announcement trailer at The Game Awards seven months later. Cristina Alexander/Digital Trendsįrontiers is a completely different story, though. I still have the Sonic Forces PS4 controller skin that came with my GameStop pre-order to prove it, and I’ve come to regret it. It was the only mainline console Sonic game to cost $40 at launch - a price tag that perhaps foreshadowed a lack of confidence in the final product. In the end, the game was a commercial failure due to a lackluster avatar creator system, sloppy writing (save for Episode Shadow), stiff animation, dull lighting, and some antagonists being falsely advertised as boss fights. That was due to various factors, including crunch issues and the development team being split in half.įast forward to 2017, and Sega’s marketing strategy for Sonic Forces involved releasing a heavy stream of trailers on YouTube every week and collaborating with Hooters in Japan. It was developed exclusively as a launch title for the PS3 and Xbox 360, but the final product didn’t live up to the heavy marketing resulting from the series’ 15th anniversary. That’s not to say that big marketing pushes have always paid off for Sega. It seems clear that Sega might be anticipating a repeat of that success with Frontiers … or at least that it hopes for one. With team-based gameplay, four storylines, level designs tailored to each team (not to mention the return of Team Chaotix), and graphics that were a huge improvement from the Sonic Adventure games, Sonic Heroes proved to be commercially successful. Sega went so far as to dub it the Year of Sonic, releasing Sonic X onto the American airwaves and McDonald’s Happy Meal toys to tie into the game (even though those toys came out several months after its release, oddly enough), as well as airing wacky commercials. It was the first Sonic game to go multi-platform, releasing not only on the GameCube, but on PS2, Xbox, and PC as well in an attempt to introduce younger audiences to the Blue Blur. In 2003, Sega went similarly hard with the marketing for Sonic Heroes. It was so popular that when the Dreamcast was put to pasture, Sega ported it over to the Nintendo GameCube under Sonic Adventure 2: Battle, which introduced a multiplayer battle mode (hence the title). The amount of gameplay content Sega packed into Sonic Adventure 2 - story campaigns from the Hero and Dark perspectives, side missions, and the beloved Chao Garden - was enough to give fans enough bang for their buck. The game was featured on the cover of several magazines, contests were run for a chance to win the game along with some Sonic 10th Anniversary merchandise, and a giant poster of Shadow the Hedgehog with the caption “Unleashed” draped the Los Angeles Convention Center like the American flag at E3 2001. Take the hype cycle around Sonic Adventure 2, the 10th-anniversary title for the series, for instance. In some ways, Sonic Frontiers‘ aggressive marketing push is a return to the early 2000s. That’s consistent with the rest of the game’s marketing cycle, which shows that Sega is more confident about the series than it has been in years. The price tag deviates from the cost of past Sonic games, and that’s another sign that Sega believes Frontiers has the scope of a full-sized Sonic game - especially since it’s the first open-world game in Sonic’s history.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |