2025 was a year packed with racing releases for the whole family, with Mario Kart World absorbing hours and hours of Switch 2 owners’ free time, yet Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds emerged as the go-to choice for veterans looking for meatier mechanics and demanding circuits. Now, we’ve learned that it’s sold more than 1 million copies, but Sega is thinking bigger.
Following “Overwhelmingly Positive” reviews on Steam and an over 80 Metacritic score, Sega is bullish on its long-term performance, especially with a physical Nintendo Switch 2 release that hasn’t arrived yet. “Initial performance did not meet our expectations, and we are aiming to sell approximately another 1 million units within this fiscal year,” an overlooked results presentation from November 2025 stated (hat tip to ResetEra).
For reference, Mario Kart World has sold over 2m copies in Japan alone, with its global total well past 9.5m copies by last September (we don’t have the current figures). Mind you, these 1m sales numbers for Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds are outdated as we wait for more recent results presentations, but with the Switch 2 port launching digitally ahead of Christmas and other versions showing promise in the lead-up to that period, the racing game could be well on its way to hit the 2m mark.
While Sega has been enjoying a great deal of success thanks to franchises such as Sonic and Like a Dragon, the company has struggled to break into the live-service space while sales of well-received premium games haven’t always matched its high expectations. No one has a clear answer as to why critical acclaim and active fan bases aren’t boosting the sales numbers further, but the entertainment giant isn’t backing down.
Also buried under the mountain of data and information primarily aimed at shareholders, the current rollout schedule makes it very clear the company is still committed to mining old IPs like Crazy Taxi, Virtua Fighter, and Golden Axe in hopes of finding more hits too. Even the Alien: Isolation sequel fans manifested into existence (currently in development at Creative Assembly) is still on track to arrive in the coming years.
