Frictional Games, the developers of last year's horror game Soma, have almost broken even with the sales of the game. In a blog post, the studio today announced that the underwater thriller has sold just over 250,000 copies; this means that after shifting another 20-30K units, they will have earned back their entire investment in the project.
The studio went on to say that whilst this is a good thing, it isn't anything amazing - they noted that Firewatch, a similar game, sold 500,000 copies in a single month, but they aren't too worried about sales:
"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."
Furthermore, they talk about how they hoped for the modding community for SOMA to really take off, in a similar fashion to how Amnesia worked, but unfortunately there hasn't been as much of a mod community for the game.
Frictional also confirmed that it has two more titles in the works: "For the first time in company history we're now developing two games at the same time. This will require non-trivial changes in how we manage the team, but in the end we're very sure it'll be worth it all. 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."
You can check out the blog post here. It's an interesting read, and talks about what areas Soma performed well in, and also where it didn't. Of course, you can read our review of the tension-filled underwater adventure by hitting this link.