Going extremely fast trumps driving around in a wasteland filled with mutants, it seems, as Sumo Digital’s Team Sonic Racing manages to beat Bethesda’s Rage 2 for the top spot at the UK Charts.
Sonic’s karting shenanigans were nowhere to be seen for the past seven years, only coming out of the garage with Team Sonic Racing’s release last week. It launched on all platforms, including the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC and the Nintendo Switch, which may have helped its success in terms of sales.
Going by Gamesindustry.biz, it seems that Team Sonic Racing’s launch was successful, topping the UK Boxed Charts for the week ending May 25. This is across all formats, of course, and the figures for Team Sonic Racing show it more than doubling the launch week sales of its predecessor, 2012’s Sonic All-Stars Racing Transformed. To add to this success story, this is the first time in more than a decade where a Sonic the Hedgehog title managed to top the charts, a feat it last did with 2008’s release of Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games. That may even be considered cheating, as Sonic shared that title with his competitor, Mario.
Team Sonic Racing did the best on the PlayStation 4, which is surprising, since I would have expected it to do best on the Nintendo Switch. Nintendo and Sega both enjoy a good working relationship now as opposed to back in the 80s to 90s, where Mario and Sonic titles competed head-to-head for market dominance. In fact, the last two titles for Sonic did relatively well on the Nintendo Switch, including Sonic Mania and Sonic Forces.
In other places on the UK Charts we find newcomer Everybody's Golf VR in number 22, the only newcomer for this week besides Team Sonic Racing. Assassin’s Creed III Remastered, which was already released for the Xbox One and PlayStation 4, saw a Nintendo Switch release last week which helped propel it to number 15.
Last week’s chart-topper, Rage 2, did a tumble and found itself down in fourth place with a week-over-week decline of 73 percent.
