Unofficially, Not as Bad as You Think
We’ve focused a lot on Sonic Colors’s sales since mid-November. In the fray, we’ve forgotten another key Sonic title, despite poor reviews–Sonic Free Riders, the Kinect launch title.
The website VGChartz.com estimates this game hasn’t exactly bombed, all things considered–selling more than 100,000 copies worldwide. Exactly, the estimated number by the website is 131,605, with North American sales accounting for more than 2/3rds of that total.
In all, more than 91,000 copies of SFR have sold domestically, and though the weekly figure dropped more than 50 percent the week after launch, the game has found an audience, with sales steadily rising through Black Friday week, and only falling about fifteen percent the first week of December.
Much of that’s held true in Europe, too. After a more than 40 percent drop in week 2, SFR found its footing in EMEAA territories, stay in the high 7,000s to high 8,000s ever since.
These trends will likely hold through the Holidays, and for Sega that may be enough. The real surprise would come if any consistency is seen afterward.
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Sonic Free Riders IS a good game, I really liked it myself and yes, it works just as fine.
@Felipe: I will say, considering the gameplay footage I’ve seen of this game on Youtube and some of the reviews saying it could be great if the controls were fine tuned, I reckon this is not the game to get a Kinect for. But if you, say, bought it for Dance Central, which is generally considered to be awesome, then I’d say there’s no harm in getting Free Riders.
If you’re able to bend ninety degrees backwards no problem and don’t mind the probability of your character totally ignoring your efforts despite your flailing body parts and breaking back that the Kinect is supposed to be able to pick up on, yeah, you’re gonna love it.
I don’t care what mainstream gaming sources are telling you about anything Kinect related. Don’t buy it. It’s a buggy piece of shit. The next 32X. If it doesn’t flop, we will have failed as gamers.
Now the real question is: How many of those copies have been returned?
Truth be told, if I had an Xbox360 and had the desire to get Kinnect, I probably would have picked this game up too. I really liked the first Riders and the second one was equal steps forwards and backwards. Ah, well.
@KyleJCrb
I’d actually be suprised if this game was returned in large quantities; this is a launch title, so no one has a strong library of Kinect games yet. Returning something like this so soon seems a bit ridiculous, is you ask me.
vg chatrz is a descent but is there anyway we can get sonic colors and sonic free sales numbers from an NPD much more accurate source.
I would only buy this only to get Roger Craig Smith to sign it.
Even then I think the collector’s set of Resident Evil 5 is more suitable to be signed.
@Greg the Cat
Oh stop it, you whiny little nostalgia hog. You may not like this game, but there are still people out there who like it.
I haven’t played Sonic Free Riders yet (I still don’t have a Kinect), but I always enjoyed the Sonic Riders series of Sonic games. It’s good to know that it’s not as bad as people think it is (So sick of whiners thinking that the recent Sonic games are bad). I might play this game soon when I have the chance, but we’ll see.
@Vulpine
If you haven’t played the game, how do you know-?
Oh, who am I kidding? It’s YOU of all people. I pretty much know where this entire comment section is going to turn. krazeeKidd, out!
I’d get this game……if I gave a shit about the Microsoft 32X– er, I mean, Kinect. Seriously, if it was like the other Riders games, except with the controls fine-tuned, and a lot more features added to it, and it wasn’t a launch title for a gimmicky Wii-clone that is trying to be original, then yeah, I’d buy it. I mean, come on. What’s wrong with a controller, Microsoft?
@Greg Just because the 32X failed, doesn’t mean it should have. The marketing was what ultimately brought it, the Saturn, the Sega CD, and even the Dreamcast to fall in terms of sales and success. The 32X had a few great games- the remake of the Star Wars arcade game was close to flawless- if the 32X had been marketed towards the ‘play arcade at HOME’ crowd, it could have done a little better. Sure, you had arcade classics on home consoles already, but they weren’t straight ports. They took huge dips in quality and it showed. The Saturn remedied this and looked better too, but if they could have kept the add on and the Saturn system as separate entities, it would have been a somewhat more smart move to make rather than having three distinctly separate systems out all at the same time.
Regardless.. I’m not defending Free Riders. The whole series is too choppy and unresponsive for me. It’s like taking the flawed snowboard levels in Sonic Adventure and making a racing game straight from that. Noo thanks.