 So, about Sonic Dream Team. If you didn't see the announcement last week, there's potentially good news and potentially bad news depending on your personal perspective, because good news, Sega has announced a brand new Sonic the Hedgehog game, yes, another one in 2023. Sonic Dream Team. There's only a little bit of footage in the trailer, but wow, what footage. I mean, not everybody has the same idea of what a Sonic game should be, but for those of us who've been a little bit perhaps less than impressed with, say, Sonic Superstars and the visual direction that game went in, this new one looks absolutely brilliant, it's bursting with colorful fresh new ideas, which is really what we want to see. The potential downside to this is that for some reason, the game is exclusive to Apple Arcade, and that's made some people quite unhappy. Understandably, nobody wants to have to go and buy a tablet for the sake of playing a Sonic game, and some people were just annoyed to discover that, hey, this is a tablet game anyway, because it looks like it could be a console release. We've got a kind of awkward situation here where Sonic Superstars looked to some people like it was just a glorified mobile game, whereas the actual glorified mobile game looks more like it deserved to be on console. So what's going on here? Why has Sega decided that this particular Sonic game can only be played on Apple devices? That's not all, Sonic Dream Team raises questions about the state of mobile gaming in general, and the question of whether exclusives in 2023 still carry the same weight that they did, say, 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago. First things first, why is Sonic Dream Team exclusive to Apple Arcade? Why is this game out on mobile in general? Because it was made by the mobile development team. This game was not developed by Sonic Team, or by Sega of Japan. It was made by Sega Hardlight, the mobile development team that Sega owns. They've made such hits as Sonic Rush, which is one of the better endless runners. It's certainly the last mobile game that I sank my teeth into before kind of deciding that all mobile games are repetitive time-sinks that don't really do anything for me. That's not to say that Sonic Rush killed my interest in mobile games in general, it's just that that was the point where I realised, hang on a second, why am I wasting my life with this? Certainly though, I put in more than a few hours in Sonic Rush, enough to unlock a lot of stuff despite not actually paying any money for it. This game having been developed by Sega Hardlight, it was never going to be on console. This was designed from the start as a mobile game. Another game that Sega Hardlight recently made is Sonic Racing, which uses a lot of the same assets from Team Sonic Racing, and so a lot of people don't necessarily think of it as being anything more than a mobile adaptation of the same game that you can play on consoles. So people don't necessarily notice when that game, for example, goes exclusive to Apple Arcade as well. I think the challenge with this game is that Sega Hardlight seemed to have knocked it out of the park so spectacularly that people have seen footage of this game and seen the initial announcement trailer and immediately thought, great, I want to play that. Oh, it's a mobile game. Like the way that the trailer is put together, it starts with that wonderful 2D animation, which is normally a mainstay of the console game's announcement trailers. And so people see that and then they see some of the footage and they're like, brilliant, when can I play it? And then it says exclusive to Apple Arcade and people are going, oh no, this one's only on tablet. Oh, I don't want to play on tablet controls. And so you can see how just by virtue of the way that this trailer was put together, it got a lot of people's hopes up and then suddenly they were dashed when they realized what they were actually looking at. This isn't to say that Sonic Dream Team is going to be a bad game. It's hard to make that call. We've seen so little of it at this point, but it certainly is a game where people would probably prefer to play it with controller and having seen what the mobile team have come up with, they got their hopes up thinking that this was going to be something more than it actually is. If anything, that means that Sega Hardlight deserve yet another tremendous pat on the back because, as said, they're doing some spectacular work. And the fact that this game looks better than some of the console Sega Sonic games that we've had recently does suggest they've really done a good job. Okay, so this game was never coming to mobile, but why specifically lock it onto Apple devices? Why can I not play this on my Android phone? The answer to that is more related to the challenges that have faced the mobile gaming market for a very long time at this point. Because if, like me, you kind of got sick of these things, it's probably because a lot of them are free to play games that you then have to put money into. Otherwise, it just doesn't let you play the game properly. You have to wait forever for things to unlock. This being the state of the mobile gaming sphere at the moment, companies like Apple and Google have seen an opportunity to become the Netflix of gaming by offering a subscription service where you get access to a lot of these mobile games, but without all of the constant grinding, or without all of the microtransactions, or at least with significantly fewer microtransactions. The transaction is simple, you pay a monthly subscription for Google Play Pass or for Apple Arcade, and you get access to a lot of the games that would be otherwise free to play, but filled with microtransactions. But instead, you get them in a form that is actually playable, which is nice. You also get a bunch of bonus games which are exclusive to these platforms, which otherwise you would either have to purchase, or which you just can't get otherwise. It's basically the same as Netflix. Now, whether that's exactly what any gamer wants is up for debate. Some people are on board with this kind of subscription model for gaming. Some people would rather just pay for a game and then own it, because you're still sidestepping one of the major issues that's got in the way of mobile gaming. Either way, for developers, Apple Arcade is very appealing. You get paid for your game, and you get to reach an audience that otherwise wouldn't play your games because they just don't want to put up with the microtransaction nonsense. The downside with this is the same as with any subscription service, which is that if your game is not necessarily bringing in and maintaining a large number of players and subscribers, then Apple wants less to do with you. Which is a problem for small developers, certainly, but not necessarily a problem if you happen to own one of the most popular and widely recognizable video game characters in history. There's been a lot of talk this week about a quote from Sega executive Osamu Ohashi who said, quote, simply put, we want Sonic to surpass Mario. And a lot of people have looked at Sonic Dream Team and have looked at this Apple Arcade exclusivity contract and they have said, how is Sonic going to surpass Mario if he's locked onto Apple devices? And the simple answer is, because Sega are not necessarily going after the people who are already playing Mario games. They're going after a new audience. This is very much the PepsiCo style of business. Long, long, long ago, Pepsi was in direct competition with Coca-Cola over who could make the best Cola drink. And Pepsi was constantly losing that fight because most people prefer Coca-Cola. So PepsiCo looked at the market and they said, what else can we do? How can we reach people who wouldn't buy Coke and instead find an entirely new market? One of the things they settled on was bottled water, which means that it's PepsiCo's fault that the oceans are filling up with plastic where once upon a time we all had water fountains everywhere. But the point is it worked. PepsiCo grew to be significantly larger than Coke all by selling products that were not Coke, which is, I mean, that's logical, right? Just move to a different market. I say this and I use this particular story as an example because Nintendo saw the success of PepsiCo reaching out to a wider market of people who like to drink things. And they said, how can we do that too? And instead of targeting specifically the teenage male audience that most video games at the time were aimed at, they decided, let's make games for girls. Let's target games at older people as well. Let's make games for everyone instead of for a very niche demographic. And that's the Wii, that's the DS, that's behind a lot of the success that Nintendo has seen in recent years because they widened their target audience. And here, Sega are doing kind of the same thing. That's the point of their mobile division, which is to reach people who play games who wouldn't play games on a console. Nintendo has dipped their toes into the water a bit with this kind of thing. They've tried. But their efforts on the mobile sphere are always a little bit half-hearted because really they would prefer people to pay for a Nintendo Switch. And so you get games like Pokemon Go as the big obvious example, which has done very, very well. Mario Run, they kind of tried, but that came just before the Switch took off. And since the Switch has come along, a lot of these mobile properties have either been kind of shutting down like Dr. Mario World, or they're just kind of left to the side and they're not really given attention. Meanwhile, Sega has said, right, we can dominate in the mobile sphere. And so Sega Hardlight exists to make a lot of these games at a very high quality, it must be said, which reach people who would never buy a console. To that end then, Apple Arcade serves Sega's purposes very well because it means that they can get Sonic games played by a lot of people who are just subscribing to this subscription service anyway. They don't have to pay any money and Sega gets a lot of that revenue from the Apple subscription service, but also they get the brand recognition that comes from being one of the top publishers on Apple Arcade. If the goal is to surpass Mario, then getting that brand recognition, that's always been the Sonic the Hedgehog business model. And if people are looking at Sonic games, if people are playing more Sonic games, they're going to go and see Sonic films in the cinema when they come out. They are going to then maybe branch out and try the console games as well. It just works for Sega in general. The whole point of everything that they do with Sonic is to make him visible and the more visible he is, the more revenue they can get from him. I mean, that's the whole reason why they allow so many Sonic fan games, why there's so many Sonic things on the internet all the time, because they want you to see Sonic so much that you just keep buying his stuff. And whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is going to depend on your personal interpretation of Sonic the Hedgehog and how much you actually enjoy any of this stuff. Like some of these things are going to hit with you more than others and here they've clearly found something that has hit with people and people have said, yes, Sonic Dream Team looks really good. What, why can't I play it? And here we are. But the question then is, to what extent as an exclusive is this going to serve anyone's purposes? Like why is this game not more widely available if the whole point is to just get Sonic everywhere? And that is a bit of a challenge because yeah, it probably would be better for Sega if this game were purchasable on mobile and if they perhaps did the Sonic 4 thing of taking a mobile game that really doesn't deserve to be on console and just shoving it on console anyway. Like a lot of games from Apple Arcade have eventually been ported over to other systems. Lego Builder's Journey is one that I've played which I really enjoyed, which started as an Apple Arcade game and then got ported to console. I played it on Nintendo Switch. I think it's absolutely fantastic. It's a weirdly poignant and atmospheric and kind of heartbreaking story about growing up and having to deal with the realities of modern life and working a horrible job, which is not something that you expect a Lego game to be about, but somehow it is. And it's great that that one is now more accessible than other platforms. And so it's entirely possible that at some point in the future when the exclusivity contract runs out, Sega is going to start putting this game out to a wider audience. And because why wouldn't you? Hi, just a quick note from the edit because I don't think I quite made this point clearly enough. When I say that there's a chance this could be ported to other platforms, I mean there's an outside chance. That's a very slim chance. There's another game by Sega Hard Light, Chuchu Rocket Game, which was previously on Apple Arcade, which has since been delisted. It is now gone. It no longer can be played in any form legally and it may well be the case that that's the same for any other Sega Hard Light game going forwards. Sonic Stadium has an interesting article in which they claim to have spoken to someone who was involved in some way with Sonic Dream Team, who said that Apple was specifically involved not just in the publishing of the game, but also in its development. Now, what exactly that means is unclear and whether or not that can be taken with more than a pinch of salt is also unclear. So I wouldn't necessarily take that as gospel. But if that's the case and if Apple has been genuinely involved in the process of designing this game, it makes all the more sense that it'll stay on their platform indefinitely. So when I say maybe this is gonna come to other platforms, what I mean is maybe, maybe, maybe, and even if that is the case, it might not necessarily be any time soon. Exclusive games I feel don't hit the same way that they used to. A few decades ago, if a game was exclusive on a system, then that was a reason to buy the system. For example, I feel like one of the big ones is Final Fantasy VII, moved from Nintendo over to PlayStation, a bit gutting for all of the Nintendo fans up to that point who were just used to buying the Nintendo console and suddenly couldn't get their Final Fantasy fix. But it did gangbusters for the PlayStation and a lot of people bought PlayStation to play Final Fantasy VII because they'd heard how brilliant it was. There wasn't anything really similar on the Nintendo 64. Like yes, there are RPGs on the N64, there are, but there's nothing of the clout and the significance of Final Fantasy VII. And so that's why that one ended up being a system seller. At the same time, there have been like four, five Sonic games released this year. Sonic Dream Team is not quite as much of an exclusive experience because there are other ways of playing Sonic. Another example, so I remember when I went to buy my Game Boy, I bought a Game Boy Pocket way back in the day. I say I bought it, my parents bought it because I was a little person at the time. I desperately wanted it because Pokemon was the big thing. I didn't want a Game Boy, I wanted Pokemon and I wanted to be able to play Pokemon. So I went into electronics boutique as it was called at the time and the guy there heard that I was looking for a handheld and he tried the really hard sales push for the Neo Geo Pocket color, which I think is absolutely spectacular. And he handed this thing to me and he said, you don't want a Game Boy. Game Boy's only got like either the monochrome or it's got like 16 colors. Look at this thing. Look at how vibrant the screen is. Look at what's going on here. And he gave me Sonic Pocket Adventure to try. And bear in mind, UK guy, Powell Region, used to Sonic running at 50 hertz. He kind of chugs a bit slower on the original Mega Drive in the United Kingdom. And so playing a handheld, which was not at a lower clock speed than it should be. It was the fastest Sonic experience I'd ever had. I just breezed through that level. I was like, whoa, what was that? That was not what I was used to from Sonic. Like I felt like I was experiencing Sonic as it was meant to be played for the first time in my life. And I was extremely tempted by the Neo Geo Pocket Color for Sonic Adventure alone. Sonic Pocket Adventure, sorry. And it's a game that I would absolutely love to play. And I never have because I didn't end up buying the Neo Geo Pocket Color. I've always, always wanted one, but I didn't want a handheld. I wanted Pokemon. And so you can see how as a system seller, Pokemon definitely worked because people bought the handhelds so that they could play the game for it. Like it was about selling a game as a platform. And then the fact that you can swap cartridges out and play other things, that's an additional bonus. And I don't think a lot of people are going to go out of their way to buy an Apple iPad or a Mac so that they are an iPhone so that they can play Sonic Dream Team. Because it's one game, there have been so many other Sonic games this year. And if you don't want this one, you can just play a different one. Like to a certain extent, exclusives don't work the way that they used to because there's so much more choice now because if you don't necessarily want to play Pokemon, you can play Temtem. You can play one of the other Myriad Mon likes, which is apparently what we're calling this genre, which does the Pokemon thing. And in a lot of cases, does it significantly better than Game Freak are doing it at the moment. And these games are everywhere. And so an exclusive experience is not what it once was. I look at, for example, the PlayStation 5 and I've got a PS4 and I love the PS4, it's brilliant. There's only really one game thus far that I've seen for the PS5 that is a PS5 exclusive that has caught my eye enough for me to consider it. And that's Spider-Man 2. But I've already got Spider-Man, the original Spider-Man on PS4. So I don't need a PS5 just to play Spider-Man because I've got functionally the same experience, albeit stripped down with a different story and not with quite the same bells and whistles, already on the other platform. So it's a lot harder to justify buying a four, five, 600 pound console, just for one game, which is a sequel to something that I've already got and which, to be honest, I loved Spider-Man. I've made several videos about it on this channel. I went out with the goal in mind of 100% completing it and getting all the collectibles. Got bogged down doing the Taskmaster missions. I've never actually finished the main story. It kind of, it got to a nice comfortable place where everybody was happy. You know, the kind of the lull before the big final act and everything kicks off. And I kind of just wanted to leave Peter Parker happy. Like it's weird to see Peter Parker happy. Obviously, this is a ridiculous tangent, but it's weird to see Peter Parker happy. And I just wanted to keep that status quo where everything is nice. And I have had some spoilers for the end of the game and I don't want that to happen to Peter. So I just figured, yeah, just maintain this. This is nice. Maybe I care far too much about a fictional character, but whatever, what are you gonna do? I don't necessarily think that Sega is going to get everything they want from having this game as an Apple exclusive because it would probably better serve them to have it out for a wider audience. But I imagine that Apple have given them a significant amount of money to do it this way. If you are hoping for me to come down hard and say either this is great or this is terrible, I'm sorry, I'm gonna have to disappoint you because this is just a thing. Like, there are some advantages to a game being released this way. There are some significant disadvantages. It's obviously absolutely awful for everybody who wanted to play it and doesn't own an Apple device, but at the same time, there are so many other Sonic games available that you're not hugely inconvenienced. And I feel like the only reason this is an issue at all is because Sega Hardlight did such a phenomenal job of making this game look interesting. If this game looked slightly different, if that first trailer hadn't had that 2D animation at the start even, I think that this would have been received very differently. It's just the fact that with that announcement, they said, look, here's a Sonic game. It looks just like or better than the games that are on console. This looks like a console release. Actually, it's not, it's only coming to Apple devices. And everybody just went, ugh, must we do this, Sega? Must we? And for some people, that's gonna be all right. And for some people, it's not. And that's just where we are, unfortunately. We'll have to wait and see whether this game goes out to anyone else. We'll have to wait and see whether this game is even worth playing to begin with. But in the meantime, at least you've got Sonic Superstars. The moral of the story is sometimes Sega made weird decisions and it's just odd for everybody involved. But also the moral of the story is that maybe mobile gaming's getting slightly better, slightly.