It's probably fair to say it has been a while since a Sonic game generated a significant amount of fanfare at launch. Sonic Frontiers appears to have bucked that trend, and the numbers it racked up on Steam during its first week on the market continue to solidify that the blue blur's latest outing has been a hit.
A few hours after Frontiers launched last week, 19,181 people were playing it according to SteamDB (thanks, PC Games Insider). That has remained the game's concurrent player record on the platform ever since, and it smashed the previous concurrent player record on Steam that had been standing for quite some time prior to that. Sonic Mania was the previous record holder, registering a total of 11,937 players back in 2017 shortly after its own launch.
Moving on down the Sonic Steam chart, All-Stars Racing Transformed rounds out the top three, Origins, the remastered collection of the original Sonic games that launched over the summer, in fourth, and Sonic Forces in fifth. Frontiers' record is worthy of celebrating for Sega when compared to all of those titles, but particularly Origins and Mania. The 2D games are often celebrated while the blue blur's 3D outings, especially recently, are labeled not good enough.
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Frontiers, its numbers on Steam, and a pretty great score on Metacritic might be an indicator that the tides are finally turning. The newest Sonic game might not be the most polished game the series has ever seen, but it's finally evidence that Sega is willing to stray from its Sonic path and try out new ideas. Fans will be hoping this is the start of a new chapter for Sonic games, and comments made by Sega since launch would certainly suggest that's the case.
Less than a week on from its launch, players have already discovered an awful lot about Frontiers. Both information Sega wants you to know and a few things it intended to remain hidden. That the final boss is different if you play on hard when it comes to the former, and that there were plans to have Sonic lose his memory in the latter, a tidbit discovered by players unearthing Frontiers' unused dialogue.