Sonic the Hedgehog Series Tops 1.5 Billion in Sales and Downloads - Sales

by William D'Angelo , posted on 28 October 2022 / 4,125 Views

Sega has updated in its latest earnings report the sales and downloads for its biggest franchises and has announced the Sonic the Hedgehog series has surpassed 1.51 billion units. The figure includes full game sales and downloads of free-to-play titles.

One year ago the Sonic the Hedgehog series was at 1.38 billion in combined full game sales and downloads of free-to-play titles.

The first Sonic the Hedgehog released in 1991 for the Sega Genesis and sold 15 million units as it was bundled with the console for a while. It is the best-selling entry in the series. Sonic the Hedgehog 2 for the Sega Genesis is the second best-selling entry with six million units sold.

The next entry in the Sonic the Hedgehog series, Sonic Frontiers, will launch for the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC Steam on November 8.

Here is the updated list of sales and downloads of Sega franchises:

Sonic the Hedgehog - 1.51 billion
Total War - 40.4 million
Puyo Puyo - 37.7 million
Football Manager - 25 million
Chain Chronicle - 25 million
Yakuza - 19.8 million (Full game sales only)
Shin Megami Tensei - 19 million
Virtua Fighter - 18.8 million
Hatsune Miku - 18.5 million
Persona - 15.5 million
Phantasy Star - 9 million (Full game sales only)
Fist of the North Star - 7.84 million
Sakura Wars - 5.8 million
Aladdin - 0.58 million (Full game sales only)
Beat King - 0.51 million (Full game sales only)

A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.

10 Comments

Machina (on 28 October 2022)

I wish Sega would stop bundling F2P downloads in with their figures in order to pad them out.

I also hope other companies don't start doing this, it'll make it impossible to work out actual sales for franchises.

Torpoleon Machina (on 28 October 2022)

If anything, they should include both figures. Total without F2P & mobile and total with F2P & mobile.

rapsuperstar31 (on 28 October 2022)

That doesn't sound right, is there that many free to play Sonic games out there. Mario has sold what 776 million if wikepedia is correct.

shikamaru317 rapsuperstar31 (on 28 October 2022)

Tons of people played the Sonic endless runners on mobile, many hundreds of millions of people.

Sogreblute rapsuperstar31 (on 28 October 2022)

After looking it up. 80-90% of all those downloads are from the mobile free to play games.

Salnax rapsuperstar31 (on 28 October 2022)

Sonic Dash (the free Temple Run clone) alone has over 500 million downloads as of last year.

Besides that, Sonic has been popular on mobile devices for 15+ years now. Here is an old article from mid-2008 talking about how the port of Sonic 1 had already sold 8 million.

https://www.mcvuk.com/business-news/sonic-rings-mobile-success/

Bear in mind the iPhone was less than a year old at this point, and Android hadn't been released yet.