When Sonic Blitz was abruptly cancelled last week, its developers said the decision was connected to broader changes taking place within the studio.
We now know how broad those changes really are.
SEGA-owned Rovio is closing its Copenhagen studio and discontinuing all operations in Denmark following the cancellation of Sonic Blitz. A Rovio spokesperson confirmed the decision to Mobilegamer.biz on August 25, saying a redundancy process is currently underway. Around 20 employees worked on the cancelled game, although Rovio cannot yet confirm exactly how many people will ultimately lose their jobs because some may potentially be moved onto other projects within the company.
That gives considerably more context to the announcement Sonic City covered on August 21, when the Sonic Blitz team confirmed that development would end during the game’s soft-launch phase and access would shut down on August 24. At the time, the developers only referred to unspecified “broader changes at our studio.” The game, its official Discord server and its X account have now closed, and those broader changes have turned out to include the closure of Rovio Copenhagen itself.
Rovio says employees who cannot be reassigned elsewhere within the company will receive a transition package that includes outplacement services and wellbeing support. The company described the decision to leave Copenhagen as “extremely difficult,” particularly given the wider employment situation across the games industry.
More significantly for the game itself, SEGA West COO and Rovio CEO Alex Pelletier-Normand has now directly explained why Sonic Blitz did not make it out of soft launch. Rovio’s original idea was to combine the immediate action associated with Sonic with a collectible card system that would encourage players to keep returning, including cards containing information about characters and their history across the franchise. According to Pelletier-Normand, that idea simply did not produce the long-term engagement Rovio needed.
“It seems that retention hasn’t been really good for us, which is one of the first steps.”
Pelletier-Normand said Rovio needed to see players staying engaged for extended periods, and the soft launch did not validate that part of the game’s design. Mobilegamer.biz reports that Sonic Blitz accumulated more than 200,000 downloads, according to AppMagic, with most coming from Brazil and a smaller portion from the Philippines. Download numbers alone, however, were not enough if those players were not sticking around.
The comments also offer a surprisingly candid assessment of SEGA and Rovio’s wider attempt to grow Sonic on mobile. Pelletier-Normand said he remains convinced there is a way to reach more mobile players with Sonic, but acknowledged that doing so has proven much more complicated than either SEGA or Rovio expected. Despite remaining proud of Sonic Blitz and the team that built it, his conclusion about the experiment was straightforward: “it didn’t work.”
That makes the end of Sonic Blitz more consequential than a mobile game simply failing to graduate from soft launch. Rovio had been testing the runner and collectible-card hybrid since 2025 as part of SEGA’s efforts to expand Sonic’s mobile audience, and its cancellation has now resulted in an entire development location being shut down. For the approximately 20 people who worked on the project, the consequences extend considerably further than an end-of-service screen.
It also finally answers the biggest question left hanging by last week’s announcement. Sonic Blitz was not cancelled because Rovio merely decided to change direction with a promising game. Its core retention numbers did not meet expectations, the project was stopped, and Rovio subsequently decided it could no longer justify continuing its Copenhagen operation.
A rough ending for a game that never even made it to a full global launch.
Stay tuned to Sonic City for more Sonic Blitz News and Updates!
Source: Mobilegamer.biz
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