This year, according to Sega, will see “several” remakes, remasters, and new games
By the end of March 2023, Sega promises a “substantial increase in new titles,” including fresh remakes and remasters of its vintage games.
Parent firm Sega Sammy announced excellent sales of console and PC games, noting greater profitability compared to FY2021 and predicting even higher numbers for FY2023, in a presentation outlining its performance for the fiscal year ending March 2022.
This estimate attributes this result to a “substantial increase in titles” and to the “high number of new titles” that were launched during FY2022.
Included in this are a number of brand-new games that it defines as “remake / remaster, spin-off, [or] change of theme,” and for which it claims to be “planning many titles.”
Sonic Colors Ultimate, Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania, and Lost Judgment (which is considered a spin-off of Yakuza) were among the titles sold in this category during the previous fiscal year, according to Sega.
In the fiscal year ending March 2023, Sega projects that it will sell about 5 million games in the same category. This will feature the June 23rd release of Sonic Origins.
Sonic, the well-known blue hedgehog, is amongst one of the most popular characters of all time, with 6.7 million searches happening monthly. He is closely followed by Pikachu with 3.7 million searches and then Pac-Man with 3 million searches per month. Sonic is incredibly popular for trying to get to places in the quickest time possible. Emphasis is made on precision and speed, and this makes him stand out from all the rest including Super Mario.
Ever since his introduction, Sonic has been popular in the gaming industry with a number of games released with Sonic as the main character including Sonic Frontiers (released in 2022) and also other games that were inspired by his theme of speed such as the slot by Microgaming called Sonic Links available at most new slot sites in the UK.
Sega claims that seven of their games from the previous fiscal year, which were all simultaneously published worldwide and supported across several platforms, sold about 6 million copies overall.
It projects sales to more than quadruple, to almost 13 million, for the fiscal year ending in 2023, as a result of a sharp rise in the number of new titles receiving simultaneous global releases (13 compared to 7).
Sega is reportedly working on high-budget reboots of Crazy Taxi and Jet Set Radio, but as these projects are still in the early stages of production, they almost probably won’t be included in the remakes and remasters scheduled for FY2023.
The two reboots are said to be the first games in Sega’s five-year “Super Game” initiative, which executive VP Shuji Utsumi has previously described as “the development of AAA titles that cross over Sega’s comprehensive range of technologies,” according to sources cited in a Bloomberg report from last month.
Both games are still in the early phases of production and could yet be scrapped, but it’s said that the next Crazy Taxi has been in development for more than a year with a potential release date of 2024 or 2025.
