Sega claims the Sonic franchise has surpassed 1.5 billion sales and downloads

videogameschronicle.com:

Sega has published updated sales of its biggest franchises and claimed that the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise has cleared 1.5 billion units.

This number includes full premium game sales, as well as downloads of the various Sonic free-to-play titles that have been released over the years.

While the franchise sold well at the peak of its powers in the 90s, and continued to have a strong following despite the disappointing commercial and critical reception of some titles in the 2000s, the explosion of the mobile market has taken the Sonic franchise to new heights.

Since 2013, Sega has released Sonic Dash, Sonic Runners, Sonic Dash 2: Sonic Boom and Sonic Runners Adventures on mobile. These endless runner games are free-to-play but feature microtransactions.

Factor in the various sequels, and free-to-play versions of the original Sonic titles, and it becomes clear that much of the 1.51 billion number is made up of free-to-play mobile downloads.

For example, the most popular of the endless runner games, Sonic Dash, has reportedly surpassed 500 million downloads as of 2021, making up over one-third of the franchise’s overall units with one game.

Sonic Forces: Speed Battle, a mobile game from 2017, reportedly passed 94 million downloads as of April 2022.

Google‘s Play store also offers some insight into how the games have performed, as it places badges denoting how many times the game has been downloaded on popular titles.

Sonic Dash has a 100 Million + downloads badge while Sonic Forces, as well as several other Sonic titles including a rerelease of the first game in the franchise, have the 50+ Million downloads icon.

While this isn’t firm evidence, as it’s unclear whether Google counts re-downloading the game as a separate download, or