PlayStation Plus was ‘devastating’ for Oddworld: Soulstorm sales, claims creator
Lorne Lanning, the creator of the Oddworld series, has claimed that including his most recent game, Oddworld: Soulstorm in PlayStation Plus as a bundled monthly game was “devasting” for the game’s sales.
Speaking on the Xbox Expansion Pass podcast this week (transcribed by VGC), the veteran developer claimed that despite his studio Oddworld Inhabitants expecting around 50,000 to 100,000 copies of Oddworld: Soulstorm to be claimed during its time as a PS Plus free game, it was downloaded over 4 million times.
Lanning believes the studio thus missed out on profits due to the unexpected popularity of the title on Sony‘s subscription service eating into potential sales.
PS Plus typically delivers its subscribers up to four PS4 and PS5 games each month as part of the subscription price.
Notice: To display this embed please allow the use of Functional Cookies in Cookie Preferences.
“It’s kind of a double-edged sword… I’ll give you an example around Soulstorm,” Lanning said, when asked about PS Plus. He explained that initially, he felt that doing a PS Plus deal was a necessity “to get the project done.”
“We were hitting a number of legacy technical debt issues and talent issues and you know, the game industry is emerging fast, huge companies are paying fortunes,” he explained.
Lanning said that he was initially hesitant to give the Soulstorm away on PS Plus due to the lack of PS5 consoles that were available in January 2021. However, the team eventually agreed, with Lanning saying that “we thought we did a pretty good deal”.
He explained: “The most we could sell is less than the money we’re getting… We might sell 50,000 units at launch, maybe 100,000 units. It was pretty small numbers because there wasn’t going to be a lot of PS5s.”
La
Read more on videogameschronicle.com
