Sonic The Hedgehog’s Lifetime Sales Speed Past 1.5 Billion Units

It’s been a pretty big year for Sonic the Hedgehog. From the commercial success of his second movie back in April to the impending release of the much-anticipated Sonic Frontiers in November and the new Sonic Prime Netflix series in December, it is getting pretty difficult to miss SEGA’s speedy lil spike ball.

According to the company’s latest annual report, it is clear that Sonic’s popularity isn’t slowing down. The figures contained within the report detail the lifetime sales for all of the company’s assets (original and acquired) including the likes of Puyo Puyo, Football Manager and Persona. It is Sonic, however, that stands blue head and shoulders above the rest, with the franchise having sold a total of 1.51 billion units (game sales and downloads across paid and free-to-play titles) since its conception back in 1991.

As pointed out by video game industry analyst @MauroNL3 on Twitter, this is a pretty big number for SEGA. The next franchise to come close to Sonic’s supremecy is Total War on 40.4 million units sold – only one billion four hundred and sixty million units to go!

In SEGA’s 2021 annual report, Sonic was standing at 1.38 billion sales, showing that the hedgehog is making no motion of slowing down and we can only imagine that it will continue to improve in the final two months of the year. With Frontiers and Prime right round the corner, the Sonic hype train is going nowhere.

Elsewhere, the 2022 report stated that the Persona franchise is currently sitting on a perfectly respectable 15.5 million units sold. Whether this includes the recent rerelease of Persona 5 Royal or not, we cannot tell, although our glowing review hopes that more people will play the game in the coming months.