In the current gaming industry, certain practices are done to promote upcoming titles. One of them is letting gaming outlets like websites, magazines, and particular streamers get a chance to play the game and showcase footage or talk about their experiences. The hope is that this will get people more excited for the upcoming title and thus will drum up buzz about it. Then, when the game is really close to launching, the dev team will send out review copies to a bunch of sites and outlets so they can try to “win over” their own fanbase potentially with their review score. But for Sonic Frontiers, we might not be getting that.
On Twitter, gaming writer and insider Kirk McKeand made a post that noted how he talked to several other people in the industry and that only a few of them got review codes for Sonic Frontiers. But, of course, that’s not what you’d expect for a AAA title like that. Or, as he said in his tweet, “not reassuring.”
If you think about a certain other AAA title that’ll release the day after SEGA’s new game, they just had their review embargo drop, and it was flooded with reviews. Ones that were so popular that many think it’ll be a Game of the Year nominee despite it not even being out yet!
So why is it that SEGA and Sonic Team are seemingly holding the game back from getting reviewed a lot? Well, there are a few reasons people are speculating. The first is that SEGA fears what these first batches of reviews will say, so they’re “handpicking” the ones they feel they can trust. No, we don’t mean “trust,” as in “they’ll trust them to do a good review about the game.” But instead, ones that they feel will be honest and fair no matter what.
The second reason, which is a bit harder to believe, is that SEGA doesn’t want these reviews to spoil too much about the game. Thus, gamers can “form their own opinions” about the title. While that’s nice to think about, that would go against the norm of the game industry in a big way. Plus, given fans’ feelings about the current state of the franchise, they can more easily guarantee sales by having a plethora of positive reviews.
The embargo for Sonic Frontiers ends the day before it launches. So we’ll see how many review scores pop up and what they say before the game launches on the 8th. Just to be clear, we can’t confirm that what this one insider says is true. He might just be stating for his own circle.
Source: Twitter
