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SOMA, one of 2015's best gaming experiences, has sold over 250,000 units. Developer Frictional Games revealed that they need to sell another 30,000 or so units in order to actually turn a profit on the title.The total number of sales, across all platforms, is currently at a bit over 250 000 units. This is pretty good; it'll only take 20k - 30k more until we've earned back our entire investment in the project. Given that the daily sales are still solid (about 125 units a day) and we have regular boosts from various sale events, this is bound to happen well before this year is over.
While this is a good result for us, it's by no means earth shattering. For instance, Firewatch (which has quite a few elements in common with SOMA) sold over 500k in just a month, so there's obviously room for SOMA to sell a lot more. It might seem weird, but this is actually very encouraging for us. SOMA was a really ambitious project which took 5 years to develop, used a load of external help and had a big chunk of money spent on a live action series and so forth, making it a very costly affair. Yet SOMA is well on the way to becoming profitable after just 6 months, despite not being a runaway success. This makes us a lot less worried about making another game of similar scope.
While this is a good result for us, it's by no means earth shattering. For instance, Firewatch (which has quite a few elements in common with SOMA) sold over 500k in just a month, so there's obviously room for SOMA to sell a lot more. It might seem weird, but this is actually very encouraging for us. SOMA was a really ambitious project which took 5 years to develop, used a load of external help and had a big chunk of money spent on a live action series and so forth, making it a very costly affair. Yet SOMA is well on the way to becoming profitable after just 6 months, despite not being a runaway success. This makes us a lot less worried about making another game of similar scope.
The Frictional Games blog entry continues on to offer up some ideas as to why the game didn't perform as well as anticipated. One such idea is that the game fell right in between two genres, horror and sci-fi. They feel that it may have been too much horror for fans that strictly enjoy sci-fi, but had too much sci-fi for those that like pure horror.
if we make another sci-fi game, we'll probably tone down the horror elements and make the sci-fi narrative more prominent. The reverse would be true if we made a new horror game. The idea is that this'll not only let us reach a new and wider audience, but also minimize the risk that people will mix up our games, and instead they'll see them as separate entities. With SOMA it feels we've made it clear that Frictional Games is not just about pure horror, and we want to take advantage of that and diversify the experiences we craft.
They also talk about the mod scene and what this all means for the future. Even with this news, the studio did mention that they are hard at work on two new titles. You can read more about all of this and more at the Frictional Games blog.
