Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-1031724-20160730014056/@comment-1031724-20160730235120

Yeah, Eggman's one villain I know will stay to the series' end, because a Sonic game just wouldn't be a Sonic game without him (Metal Sonic apparently doesn't share this though). Sonic Rush Adventure didn't seem quite the same without him, until the Last Story of course (anyone playing for the first time probably thought he died in Sonic Rush).

They've pretended to kill Eggman in some of the earlier games, but he always survives, so even if we think he gets blowed up, it's likely he'll just escape because if there's a new Sonic game, Eggman will be in it. Closest they came to killing him off was in Shadow the Hedgehog where Shadow kills him in a non-canon ending (because we see him in the canon ending, and the story continues to new games from there). Though they haven't been doing this as much, even when Eggman falls off a cliff in Sonic Lost World, postcredits scene revealed he survived.

But I'm starting to wonder if they're going to end the original series because they're making their more recent games set in different continuities, such as the Sonic Boom games which are set in a TV canon rather than the main games. Of course, they still probably won't kill him for real, just "seemingly" blow him up, making it possible he's dead, but just as likely he survived (as he always does) in case they want to do another game.