The secrets behind Mortal Shell's 1m sales

gamesindustry.biz:

Mortal Shell, the Dark Souls-like action game from developer Cold Symmetry, has now sold one million units worldwide.

And that doesn't include players who have touched the game via subscription services, publisher Playstack says. Mortal Shell has featured on Xbox Game Pass and PlayStation Plus.

The game initially released on PC, PS4 and Xbox One in August 2020, before coming to PS5 and Xbox Series X and S in March the following year. A Nintendo Switch version also released in December 2022. The game was broadly well received, and it shot to 500,000 sales within the first nine months.

"We track wishlist velocity and follower health of every single Steam game, but we’ve learnt not to worship these numbers"

"In the final months leading up to Mortal Shell's release it became quite evident that the game was going to launch with a great deal of interest," said Playstack VP of Publishing Rob Crossley.

"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 grown to 70,000 people within a few days. Our newsletter open-rate was illegally high too, around 60%."

Crossley said that these more community-oriented figures are a stronger indicator of a game's potential than wishlist numbers or followers on Steam.

"There's a great deal of work we put into the analytical side of PC games – we track wishlist velocity and follower health of every single Steam game, for instance – but we’ve learnt not to worship these numbers," he adds. "Some people definitely show too much reverence for wishlist data, for instance. There's no more reliable indicator for a successful game launch than an impassioned community. We saw