Developer Frictional Games today revealed that its undersea horror game, Soma, moved over 250 thousand units in its first six months.
Frictional Games said the game will have recouped its investment around the 275 thousand mark, which it will likely reach in 2016 given the rate it is currently selling—around 125 units a day. The profit bar was set high by Soma’s five-year development period, which was made considerably made more expensive by the “external help” enlisted for the project, as well as extensive use of live-action footage.
“While this is a good result for us, it’s by no means earth-shattering,” Frictional continued. The studio pointed to Campo Santo’s Firewatch, which sold 500 thousand units in its first month, as both a topical example of target sales and an inspiration.
“Soma is well on the way to becoming profitable after just six months, despite not being a runaway success. This makes us a lot less worried about making another game of similar scope,” Frictional added.
Interestingly, Frictional attributes Soma’s comparatively slow sales to the two genres the game straddles: sci-fi and horror. Rather, the fact that it straddles them. 
“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. While we think the mix works very well for the game, it seems quite possible that this has put off potential buyers.”
To help combat this genre tug-of-war, Frictional is now working on two projects simultaneously, a model it plans to keep going forward. The idea, it seems, is to leverage dual development to differentiate individual games more, and also to alleviate the sales plateaus Frictional has seen following the launch of new releases.
“The moment that Soma came out, sales of Amnesia: The Dark Descent went down too, and [have] stayed down ever since. We saw the same happening when we released Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, but since Soma is in many ways quite different from Amnesia, we thought it wouldn’t happen this time.
“But it did, and the reason seems to be that people lump both titles under a ‘Current Horror From Frictional Games’ label,” the studio added.
“By having two projects going at the same time, we can release games at much higher frequency. In turn, this let us be more experimental as we don’t have to rely as much on each new game being a big money generator. We’re still in the early phases of this transition, but it’s shaping up really well so far.”
Source: Frictional Games
Via: Eurogamer
