Mortal Shell publisher discusses unlikely success of the surprisingly popular Soulslike

destructoid.com:

Cold Symmetry’s tight and focused Soulslike Mortal Shell came out roughly three years ago, and according to the publisher, Playstack, it has sold a whopping one million copies worldwide. While it’d be easy to attribute this success to pure randomness or, perhaps, the game simply being at the right place at the right time, the publisher just revealed it had set up a fairly comprehensive marketing campaign that’s bound to have helped Mortal Shell be as successful as it’s been.

In a recent interview with gamesindustry.biz, Playstack’s Vice President of Publishing Rob Crossley went into considerable depth on what his team’s done to ensure Mortal Shell‘s success. In fact, it wouldn’t be surprising if some of the learned lessons may end up being applied to the upcoming roguelite AK-xolotl that’s being published under Playstack’s umbrella, too. “There’s no more reliable indicator for a successful game launch than an impassioned community,” said Crossley, explaining how community engagement was the key feature that helped make Mortal Shell as big of a success as it was.

Crossley revealed that, even though Mortal Shell remains a bit of a niche release, even today, it managed to move 1,000,000 copies across PC, PS4, Xbox One, PS5, Xbox Series, and Nintendo Switch platforms. Such an impressive number, according to Crossley, doesn’t even include those players who might’ve given Mortal Shell a shake via subscription services. In hindsight, Crossley claims that the first pre-release sign that Mortal Shell may end up being a big deal came from the community itself: “We were starting to see superfans share tattoos of Mortal Shell characters, and we saw countless people theorise the game’s whole storyline on our Discord, which itself had