Despite the fact that SEGA put together a pretty tight marketing campaign prior to release, including a tie-in TV show and toy line, "Sonic Boom" has become the lowest-selling title for the iconic hedgehog to date, only shipping a paltry 490,000 copies.
News comes by way of the publisher's latest financial report and a report at IGN, where it detailed that the abysmal figures encompass sales of BOTH "Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric" on Wii U and "Sonic Boom: Shattered Crystal" on 3DS, though SEGA didn't specify whether the aforementioned figure relates to copies sold-through or simply shipped to retailers. Either way, the writing is on the wall for "Sonic Boom," which sold fewer than 2013's "Lost World" which sold a total of 710,000 copies across the Wii U and 3DS platforms.
Granted, the most recent mascot title wasn't aided by the fact that the game was released with a ton of technical issues which, of course, resulted in it being panned by critics and fans alike. The game even seemed to be the cause for a mass exodus from the developer, Big Red Button.
Luckily, the news wasn't all terrible for SEGA in this report. While one of the company's long-running franchises is fading into irrelevance, Creative Assembly's "Alien: Isolation" proved to be a bona fide hit among survival horror fans, accumulating a total of 1.7 million copies sold by the end of 2014.
Hopefully, this encourages the publisher to push ahead with a sequel to the excellent "Isolation." Those of you who have played through Creative Assembly's haunted-house-in-space know that the finale provided a fair amount of closure, but if history has taught us anything, it's that the "Alien" universe can, and most probably will, be mined for more sequels.