Released back in September 2015, SOMA has sold over 250,000 copies on PlayStation 4 and PC, developer Frictional Games revealed today in a new blog post.
Calling the sales numbers “pretty good,” Frictional adds that they’re roughly 20,000 – 30,000 sales away from breaking even on SOMA. Since they sell about 125 copies per day, and boosts will come from sale events, the milestone should be hit well before 2016 is over.
Frictional then compared SOMA’s sales to Firewatch:
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.
One thing Frictional discovered is that the mix of horror and sci-fi genres in SOMA held it back from selling even more. “What this means is that the game might feel a bit too sci-fi for someone looking for a pure horror experience and vice-versa,” they said. “While we think the mix works very well for the game, it seems quite possible that this has put off potential buyers.”
Because SOMA had a negative effect on the sales of Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Frictional is thinking about differentiating the games they make a bit more so people don’t mix them up. For example, if they make another sci-fi game, “we’ll probably tone down the horror elements and make the sci-fi narrative more prominent,” and the reverse would happen for a new horror game.
Although Frictional is in the early days of their new internal development strategy, they have two games in development right now, and “it’s shaping up really well so far.”
[Source: Frictional Games]
