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SOMA, the survival horror game which released for PC and PS4 10 days ago, has sold 92,000 copies, developer Frictional Games has announced.
A breakdown of sales by platform apparently can’t be shared, however, due to legal reasons.
“The money that we’ve got from this will pretty much pay our company expenses for another 2 years,” explained a Facebook post from the studio. “Sales are still going pretty strongly too, with a total of around 2,000 copies sold per day. This number is bound to drop over time, and it’ll be interesting to see just how fast and where it stabilizes.”
The game’s sales tale is actually extremely important to the studio.
“While a lot of sales obviously come close to launch, a big part of our normal earnings comes from a slow daily trickle over the years of our existing titles,” explains Frictional. “So our average daily sales a month or so from now on is actually more important than all of the units sold up to this point.”
Sales for SOMA sit somewhere between that of Amnesia: The Dark Decent and its follow-up, A Machine For Pigs, which respectively shifted 20,000 and ~120,000 in a week.
“Our goal for SOMA’s sales is 100,000 after a month, and at the current pace it should be able to reach pretty much exactly that with a few units to spare,” continued Frictional. “However, this doesn’t mean that we’ve come close to recouping all our costs. We need to sell almost 3 times that amount to do that. But given that it took us 5 years to make the project, there’s no immediate stress to do so.
“One of the great things about funding SOMA 100% ourselves is that all money earned goes into our own pockets and is directly used to fund our upcoming projects. So we are under no pressure to recoup immediately so long as we get enough to keep going – which we certainly have now.”
Frictional also addressed how a new release tends to cannibalise sales of the previous title.
“We saw this with A Machine for Pigs; after it launched the daily sales of The Dark Descent were almost cut in half,” explains the post. “That was not that unexpected though, given that they are both from the same franchise, but still a bit weird that the games’ combined sales ended up being pretty much what The Dark Descent sold on its own before.
“What we didn’t expect was for SOMA to do the same. When the pre-orders for SOMA started, Amnesia sales dropped by about 30% or so and this drop still remains.”
As for what’s next for the studio, Frictional says it will first document SOMA’s game engine in the hope of encouraging a strong mod community, before moving on to “new secret projects”.
Source: Facebook
