SEGA Took The Lead, But It's Quickly Losing That Ground Again

There are three things certain in life: death, taxes, and Nintendo releasing a new Mario Kart game with a new console. And with the release of the highly anticipated Switch 2, Mario Kart World has been a bit of a mixed bag. Despite a strong launch, fans and critics alike have a laundry list of complaints – from critics finding little to do in the empty and rather pointless open world, to players having to exploit glitches just to race three laps on a track of their choice (only for Nintendo to patch the fun out of it).

Add in the astronomical price tag of the new console, and you’ve got what many are calling the ultimate ‘Nintendo Tax.’ With Mario Kart World, Nintendo didn’t just open Pandora’s Box of game pricing – they monetised it. £75/$80 for a AAA title that feels half-finished? No amount of coins will make that easy to swallow.

If fans giving up in record time wasn’t bad enough, Nintendo’s old rival has been showing its spiky blue head in the rear-view mirror. For the first time in decades, SEGA has been thrashing Mario Kart on the track. After Sonic x Shadow Generations earned glowing reviews, the blue blur has gone Back-2-Back (any Sonic: Rush fans reading?) with another critical success: Sonic Racing: Crossworlds. IGN’s 9/10 review called it ‘a masterclass in arcade racing,’ and for a brief moment, it felt like we were back in 1992 and SEGA was back on top. SEGA itself even seemingly felt that confidence, releasing an ad referencing the old ‘SEGA Do What Nintendon’t’ ads of the 90s.

But here’s the problem: SEGA isn’t holding onto that lead.

While Nintendo fumbles with outright extortionate pricing and patching out fun, SEGA’s response post-release has been… silence. Crossworlds launched strong, but post-release support has sputtered out faster than a bad boost start. The Festival events have gone stale and lock you out of ranking up while they’re going on, online balance remains an issue, the promised roadmap still hasn’t materialised as all we know are vague confirmations of collab racers that’ll be added at some point, and the biggest offender? The servers in this game are more broken than Sonic ‘06 at launch. Fans are already tired of waiting, and the momentum SEGA built is starting to skid.

The issues with live-service games are a bit like streaming on platforms like Twitch – when you’re not working, you’re irrelevant. This too, is the case with Crossworlds. When SEGA isn’t working on the issues that we’ve been begging SEGA to fix, players will slowly get more and more frustrated, eventually leaving, which is exactly what happened to Mario Kart World. SEGA is drifting into the same rogue banana peel as Nintendo. This stings doubly so for SEGA as this is the first time we’ve seen that quality and 90s-era confidence since, well… the 90s. The worst part in this stagnation from SEGA is that they’re not even giving us players the cliche community manager ‘we’re listening’ spiel. There’s just been a void of silence.

Recently, SEGA attempted to improve server instability during the most recent Festival, alongside Persona 5’s Joker coming into the game. However, it feels like nothing has changed. It still takes a ridiculous amount of time to get into matches, not to mention it still feels like you’re gambling in Roulette Road to see if you’ll even remain connected for the full three laps, and if that’s not bad enough, you can’t even back out of the lobby because the ‘cancel matchmaking’ button doesn’t even work.

Cue the horrifically out-of-tune E-Rank music from Sonic Unleashed, but hey, at least the game is playable, unlike ‘06.

Ripping into SEGA’s past aside, for the first time in a long time, it’s not an embarrassment to say you’re a Sonic fan. Slowly, the blue blur has been regaining that love, admiration, and respect from gamers that was eroded away through the 2000s. All that said though, we’re Sonic fans. We’re used to the rough roads and walking them with a smile, but you can only go so far. It’s that familiar cycle all over again. SEGA finally gets something right, earns back player trust, and then slips on the same old banana peel of complacency. The difference now is that in a live-service world, silence is the fastest way to lose a fanbase. Players expect consistency, updates, and communication. SEGA can’t afford to vanish behind the curtain for months while issues pile up and the novelty wears off. The longer they wait, the harder it’ll be to rebuild that excitement, no matter how many guest racers or nostalgia-fuelled tracks they drop. On the bright side, the game’s modding community is exploding in popularity!

Sonic’s comeback has been one of gaming’s best underdog stories, but Crossworlds risks turning it into yet another cautionary tale. When you’ve finally outrun Mario Kart, the last thing you should do is rest on your laurels. The foundation is there: Crossworlds has the polish, the style, and the heart that fans have been craving since Sonic Riders back in 2006. What it needs now is real communication, consistent updates, and proof that SEGA actually cares about keeping players in the driver’s seat. If they don’t, Crossworlds will just become another entry in SEGA’s long list of almost-greats.

SEGA needs to remember their own tagline: Do what Nintendon’t.