>pretending

Sega has made an ongoing effort for rougly thirty years to keep Sonic in the public consciousness with games, tv shows, movies, merchandise, collaborations, and so on. That's how all the biggest IPs in the world operate, and say what you want about Sega but at least they figured that much out.

Crash simply hasn't been taken care of to this degree and Activision doesn't have the experience needed to handle it the way Sega handles Sonic.