In a bizarre marketing twist for a game already riddled with bizarre marketing decisions, SEGA has collaborated with another YouTube personality to promote Team Sonic Racing. This time, they took a YouTuber best known for Minecraft out to SEGA Europe’s office to drive a sports car. Don’t worry, it’s relevant – Sonic was also inside.
The video’s host, DanTDM, said that while the car was ‘insane’ and the ride did look very enjoyable, he wasn’t able to take Sonic for a ‘proper spin’ due to legal reasons. Which is a shame, because the rest of the video revealed no fresh details at all about a game which still has many unanswered questions from fans.
Sadly, the footage shown in the video largely included stages, characters and gimmicks that we’d already seen, with no fresh details from the host about the game either. So we suspect that what we’re looking at here is a rather strange marketing video. You might get a kick out of it though, as we’re currently starved of any gameplay footage of Team Sonic Racing, so you can find it here, if you’re curious.
This partnership is the latest in a marketing strategy that appears to put celebrity and style over substance and detail, with past Team Sonic Racing reveals leaning heavily on Jun Senoue’s (admittedly very awesome) soundtrack rather than gameplay mechanics and features. This influencer video follows a similar stunt by SEGA’s American team, in which they invited popular YouTubers to Japan in order to perform a song with Jun Senoue to promote the game. That video was also incredibly light on detail.
We’re struggling to see what the point is, to be brutally honest, but this latest video is currently one of the top trending gaming videos on YouTube, despite its lack of information. So no doubt it’s making someone at SEGA’s marketing team happy. Time will tell whether this will effectively translate into sales – we certainly hope so!
In my decades of experience, the less footage and information shared about a game the closer to its launch, the worse the game will be. While there are exceptions, this is almost always the case, and it has happened with Sonic games before. Look at those Sonic games and Sonic ports where very little was shared about the game up until the very last minute – they were usually poor games and ports.