SEGA CEO Credits Sonic Mania With Restoring Fan Trust After Sonic Boom

SEGA Sammy President and Group CEO Haruki Satomi says Sonic Mania helped turn Sonic the Hedgehog around after the poorly received Sonic Boom era, and that fans also played a crucial part in rescuing the character’s first Hollywood movie.

In a Nikkei Gaming interview, Satomi looked back at how SEGA lost some of the goodwill it had built around Sonic and what the company learned from rebuilding it. His answer to a question about SEGA Sammy’s approach to long-running franchises was unusually frank about Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric.

Satomi explained (translated from Japanese):

Recently, we’ve begun using the term “IP amplification.” By that, we mean making sure an IP can realize its full potential.

We haven’t always succeeded with our IP. Sonic, for example, enjoyed considerable success and very high regard in the United States, even more than in Japan, but there was a period when we nearly lost that trust and reputation. It was around the time we were releasing several games under the Sonic Boom series name.

The Wii U title Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric (released in 2014) got a terrible Metascore in the 30s out of 100 on Metacritic, a US website that aggregates reviews of movies, television shows, music albums, games and other media. At the time, we were putting a lot of effort into Sonic Boom, including releasing an animated series alongside it, which was unusual back then, but the game itself simply wasn’t well received.

That led us to make a fresh start with Sonic Mania, released in 2017, in an effort to win back fans’ expectations. It earned a high Metascore of 86, and became the catalyst for Sonic’s revival.

The follow-up question asked what SEGA had done differently with Sonic Mania. Satomi’s reply covered both the fan developers behind the 2017 game and the redesign that changed the course of the first Sonic movie.

The developers behind Sonic Mania were such passionate Sonic fans that they made their own fangames, and they were well known in the community. We came into contact with them through an opportunity, and they proposed making a new Sonic game. That’s how Sonic Mania came to be developed with SEGA’s development team and fans working together.

Actually, Sonic faced another crisis. It was the film Sonic the Hedgehog, released in 2020. The Sonic design shown in the first announcement was extremely unpopular. The intention was to make him look more animal-like so he could appear alongside human actors, but the fans didn’t accept it.

Paramount Pictures in the United States, which was co-producing the film with SEGA, understood the seriousness of the situation and postponed its release to redo the character design. That’s not something you often see in Hollywood. In the end, it worked, and the film became a success, leading to the Sonic film series.

So far, three films have been released, including Sonic the Hedgehog, and a fourth is scheduled for release in 2027. In IP strategy, I think the question is always how to make the most of what makes an IP appealing.

The lessons now feed into SEGA Sammy’s broader approach to its brands. Satomi described fan-run spaces on Discord and Reddit as part of Sonic’s wider ecosystem, and pointed to SEGA’s official Sonic Discord server, launched in October, as another way of connecting with players between releases.

The interview also put a number on the company’s merchandise output. Satomi said SEGA Fave produced about 13 million plush toys in 2025, including retail goods and crane-game prizes. That’s across SEGA Fave’s business, not 13 million Sonic plushies.

Satomi’s definition of a fan extends beyond people who buy and play games, too. Someone who follows a game’s story through streams, discovers a franchise through a movie or starts collecting merchandise is still valuable to SEGA. That’s why the company wants games, animation, films and merchandise to support one another instead of relying on a new game every year.

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