Sega avoided gacha and pay-to-win mechanics in Sonic Rumble because they know overseas players don’t like them
Sonic Rumble, Sega’s first multiplayer party game in the Sonic series, is set to launch for PC and mobile platforms in Winter 2024. The 32-player battle royale title will be free-to-play, but what kind of monetization model can players expect? At Tokyo Game Show 2024, AUTOMATON talked to Sonic Rumble’s director Makoto Tase and Sonic franchise head Takashi Iizuka about their plans for the game. This article summarizes parts of the original full-length interview in Japanese.
To start with what everyone’s most curious about – Sonic Rumble will not be a gacha game. As Tase explains, “We’re aiming for a casual system that allows you to just buy what you want quickly for a small, fixed amount, rather than a gacha system that gives you a certain probability of obtaining items.” However, Sonic Rumble will include a daily free draw system to encourage players to collect items and keep coming back to the game.
Sonic Rumble will not be pay-to-win either, as the developers guarantee that nothing you can buy in the game will make you more likely to win. According to Tase, Sonic Rumble’s monetization will mostly revolve around character skins and emotes. Players will have various ways to obtain them, but the main model of monetization will be a season pass system, with each season lasting for about a month and a half. The game will also feature a Ring Shop, where players can exchange Rings for cosmetics that will be updated daily. For context, Rings are items that you collect as you play to raise your score that double as in-game currency.
It seems that, in aiming to make Sonic Rumble a worldwide hit, Sega was wary about implementing mechanics that are disliked overseas. Iizuka comments, “In the Japanese and Asian markets, it’s common to have to spend tens of thousands of yen [in a game] until you draw a rare character and finally get to move on. But this is not the case in the global market, especially for an action game like Sonic Rumble, where players should be able to enjoy the game on an equal footing. The starting point of this project itself was to make it a mobile game that would sell globally. Therefore, the monetization model was designed from the beginning based on global standards.”
Tase adds that “monetization models that use gacha mechanics have not been very successful when it comes to games targeted towards worldwide audiences of all ages. Also, such mechanics tend to be shunned overseas, so we didn’t think it was the right choice for this project.”
Sonic Rumble is scheduled to launch in Winter 2024 for PC, iOS and Android.
