The plan for Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds started with a simple goal: keep people playing long after release. The Season Pass came later, when Sonic Team had to work out how to pay for the steady flow of new content that goal required.
Speaking with AUTOMATON at Tokyo Game Show 2026, Sonic series general producer Takashi Iizuka said the team had seen the same pattern with many of Sonic’s standalone games. A new release would generate plenty of attention, players would finish it over the following months, and eventually many of them would stop playing. CrossWorlds, as an online title, was designed to last longer.
“From the beginning, we strongly wanted to make it this way. The Sonic series has a lot of standalone games, but while they tend to generate a lot of excitement immediately after release, after a few months, everyone finishes them and stops playing. However, Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds is an online title, and we wanted people to keep playing it for a long time. To keep players engaged long-term, though, you inevitably need to add new content frequently, or they’ll get bored.
So, how do you keep adding content frequently? Development budgets aren’t unlimited, so you need to recoup those costs. From there, the idea of charging for additional content through a Season Pass came about. The current business model essentially grew out of what we initially wanted to achieve.”
Iizuka also pushed back on the idea that Sonic Team set out specifically to make a Games as a Service title. For him, the long-term player base came first.
“GaaS is the mainstream model for mobile titles and the like, but it’s not that I specifically wanted to make a GaaS game. Our primary goal was simply to make Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds a game that people would continue playing for a long time.”
Sonic City previously covered Iizuka’s explanation of how CrossWorlds separates its free SEGA racers from the paid collaboration packs. That earlier interview established how the post-launch content would be divided. His latest comments explain how the paid side of that model ended up funding continued development.
When AUTOMATON asked what the team had learned from releasing CrossWorlds in this form, Iizuka said the project had begun without much focus on monetization. The funding problem came later.
“Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds started from the question of how we could make people keep playing for a long time, so it was different from the framework of a conventional GaaS title from its inception. Meaning, we started out without thinking all that much about how we would make money from it. In the end, the fact that we could only secure additional development funding through the Season Pass model is something we also see as a lesson learned.”
His next answer was even more direct:
“We made the plan from the perspective of the fans, and ended up putting profits second… Going forward, I’d like us to find the right balance.”
That balance is already relevant to the game’s second year. SEGA has confirmed Season Pass Two for fall 2026, with Godzilla and EVANGELION among six planned crossover packs. Four of those collaborations have yet to be revealed.
Iizuka had already described Season Pass Two as part of SEGA’s intention to keep supporting CrossWorlds over the long term, something we covered in July. The AUTOMATON interview now fills in the business side of that plan. Frequent additions were part of the design from the beginning, while the way to fund them was worked out afterward.
For Iizuka, the lesson is the balance between those two sides. Sonic Team planned CrossWorlds around what would keep players engaged, put profit second, and then found itself relying on the Season Pass to secure the additional budget needed to keep building new content.
Year Two will continue that same model, now with Iizuka openly saying the team wants to find a better balance between the fan-first plan and the money required to sustain it.
Stay tuned to Sonic City for more Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds News and Updates!
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