Is SONIC TEAM still a thing?

[nocturnal YL]

As in, is there still a group of developers called SONIC TEAM?

I'm asking because:

• Their website don't list anything beyond 2014 releases.
• You don't see their name listed in the game websites of the newer games. Compare: Sonic Lost World (2013), Puyo Puyo Tetris (2014), Sonic Runners (2015), Puyo Puyo Chronicle (2016), the Nintendo Switch release of Puyo Puyo Tetris (2017)

But to make things more confusing, games that aren't actually made by SONIC TEAM (like Sonic Boom) don't have their logo listed in their websites but appear in the SONIC TEAM website. Puyo Puyo Tetris S may have been because it's just a subpage of the Puyo Puyo Tetris site. It's entirely possible that they simply stopped updating their team website and don't have enough new home-grown games to prove it one way or another.

Puyo Puyo Chronicle is listed as their game in English Wikipedia while Japanese Wikipedia didn't mention the developer at all. The credits of that game seem to suggest SONIC TEAM didn't make it, but I don't know who is who — just that SONIC TEAM itself didn't get credited, unlike Puyo Puyo Tetris.

I'm also ruling out that SEGA restructured or consolidated all of their teams. Promotional prints of Project DIVA Future Tone DX (Nov 2017) proudly claim that "SEGA AM2, who also made the Virtua Fighter and Project mirai series, is behind the Project DIVA series". I don't care about other SEGA games (yet), so I didn't look elsewhere.

EDIT — Now that I think of it, SEGA has been split into two companies. SEGA AM2 belongs to the arcade publisher SEGA Interactive, while SONIC TEAM is part of SEGA Games, which publishes consumer games.

[Nester the Lark]

Interesting observations. I'm not aware of Sonic Team being disbanded.

Also, they're still very prominently credited in the trailers for Sonic Forces, including the recent E3 trailer.

[nocturnal YL]

Ah, I see.

The Sonic Forces site doesn't feature a link to their website, so I guess the theory that they stopped bothering is the correct one.

[kirbychu]

Aug 5, 2017 1:25:21 GMT -5 nocturnal YL said:

You don't see their name listed in the game websites of the newer games. Compare: Sonic Lost World (2013), Puyo Puyo Tetris (2014), Sonic Runners (2015), Puyo Puyo Chronicle (2016), the Nintendo Switch release of Puyo Puyo Tetris (2017)

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean, but all of those websites except the last two have Sonic Team's logo at the bottom. I'd guess they probably didn't work on Puyo Puyo Chronicle or the Switch version of Puyo Puyo Tetris, though lots of people seem to think they did.

They're definitely still around and making games, but I think they tend to focus their website people on the Sonic Channel and Puyo Puyo sites these days. Those are both updated pretty regularly and the former has a Sonic Team staff blog.

EDIT: Actually I just noticed the Sonic Forces site doesn't have their logo at the bottom either, so maybe they just stopped doing that from Puyo Puyo Chronicle onwards? Sonic Forces' trailer still opens with a Sonic Team logo though, and the Puyo Chronicle and Puyo Tetris S ones don't.

[nocturnal YL]

Yes, this is what I was talking about. The reason I noticed at all was because of the Sonic Team site having stopped updating, and I wasn't sure why was that the case. I'm not sure if they worked on Puyo Puyo Chronicle, and with Puyo Puyo Tetris S being a re-release and Sonic Forces being a future game, I didn't know what was really going on. And it has never occurred to me to actually check the trailers, so I asked here.