Oddworld Soulstorm: The release of the title on the PS Plus would have been devastating for sales according to its creator


With the new PS Plus, we have understood that sony won’t attempt to directly compete with Xbox Game Pass, as Jim Ryan has hammered home the point that releasing PlayStation Studios games on day one on the service can’t be profitable. However, the manufacturer has already carried out this strategy in recent months with games from third-party publishers, such as Microsoft, and one of the titles that experimented with this was Oddworld Soulstorm. But obviously, it was not very profitable for Oddworld Inhabitants.

A big shortfall?

In an interview with the Xbox Expansion Pass podcast, relayed by VGC, Lorne Lanning, who is the founder of Oddworld Inhabitants, says this strategy hasn’t paid off very well for the studio, quite the contrary. If he affirms that the deal was far from being deceitful, and that everything was honest on the part of Sony, the bet to launch the game directly in the PS Plus did not pay off very well.

He says the studio expected few PS5 sales given that at the time, in January 2021 (when the game was originally supposed to be released before being pushed back), there were still few PlayStation 5s on the market. market, and Oddworld Inhabitants therefore expected to make few sales on this platform, between 50 and 100,000 according to estimates. (which set the price of the deal between the studio and Sony):

We were thinking ‘how much could we sell? “. We needed the money to complete the project and we thought we got a great deal. In January, it is impossible for us to sell more than that. »

Except that the pandemic came to invite itself in this affair, which prompted the studio to postpone Oddworld Soulstorm in April 2021. And inevitably, three months later, the consoles were more numerous. And when the game came out, no less than 4 million downloads have been madefar from the first estimates of the studio, and probably even those of Sony:

Because it was postponed in April, we had the most downloaded game on PS5 and it was approaching, I think… close to four million units or something, for free […] For us, it was devastating. »

If nothing says that the game would have been so popular without the PS Plus, we can easily imagine that the studio wonders how big the shortfall is here. What reinforce the debates around the games made available day one in the catalogs of subscriptions.



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