Oddworld: Soulstorm Sales Were 'Devastating' Due to PlayStation Plus Launch - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 13 April 2022 / 4,812 Views
Oddworld Inhabitants CEO and co-founder Lorne Lanning in a recent interview with YouTube channel Xbox Expansion Pass says that Oddworld: Soulstorm being available for free at launch on PlayStation Plus hurt the games sales and called it "devastating" for the studio.
"Let me give you an example around Oddworld: Soulstorm," said Lanning via Wccftech. "Out of necessity to get the project done we were hitting a number of technical debt, legacy issues, talent issues... The game industry is emerging fast, huge companies are paying fortunes while we're just independent and self-financed.
"Sony was like 'Hey, why don't we do a deal?' and the way we were working out the intention of a deal was that we would be free for a month on PS Plus. But we were supposed to deliver Oddworld: Soulstorm in January. At that time there weren't going to be any game machines. We were like, how many could we possibly sell, no one ever penetrates more than 10%, 11% on a new launch. Even the most successful titles you think everyone bought this title for that new machine but then you find out and man, 20% is enormous if someone got that on a new launch title.
"Then COVID just completely kicked us in the gut because we were distributed development across the planet. Now every studio that we were working with is going into lockdown, everyone's working from home and no one can hand a controller next to them to the other person. That's how you build games, right? I never would have said we could do it like this but it was forced upon us and we had to figure it out. That's a long way of saying we needed the money to complete the project and we thought we did a pretty good deal because we got this much money. We thought in January there was no way we'll sell more than this, the most we could sell is less than the money we could get, so we did the deal. Now through no fault of Sony's COVID happened and this delayed us from January to April.
"The deal was still for one free month. What we thought was that we might maybe sell 50K units at launch or maybe a hundred thousand; it was pretty small numbers because it wasn't going to be a lot of PS5s and lockdown looked like it was going to affect the number of machines manufactured as well, so there would be shortages at retail which for our deal would be kind of a good thing. Then there wouldn't be as many game machines out there to get the free game, but because it slipped to April, we had the highest downloaded game on PlayStation 5 with Oddworld: Soulstorm. It was approaching at the end of the day close to four million units or something like that for free because they were all subscribers. For us it was devastating and so that's how kind of the economies work.
"You might make a deal on a certain number of units at a certain price, there are different ways to do it but that's how slipping can really sting the developer right? No one did a dirty deed, it's just Earth in 2020 and 2021."
Developer Oddworld Inhabitants released Oddworld: Soulstorm for the PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, and PC via the Epic Games Store in April 2021. It was also available for free for PlayStation Plus subscribers.
Oddworld: Soulstorm Enhanced Edition was later released in November 2021 for the Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC via Epic Games Store.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel dedicated to gaming Let's Plays and tutorials. You can contact the author at wdangelo@vgchartz.com or on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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Giving away games for free hurts sales...Who knew?!
Many here will claim that it actually improve sales =p
Many? As in Microsoft themselves and multiple developers who put their games on Game Pass? Commenters here wouldn't know if they sold better without developers or MS saying they did.
But 4 million people downloaded the game. That's just as good as sold right?
no not when sony gives just gives an upfront fee that probably onlycovered some of the cost of making it
From the interview it seems like he expected the game to sell 50k, and sony paid the equivalent for 100k sales, so that should have more than covered the cost and some profits, unless he was expecting to not break even from the beginning with 50k sales.
Lanning has always been a bit deluded tbh what were you expecting Lorne? This reminds me of the author of The Witcher moaning he only got the $20k or so he demanded upfront because he refused the offer of royalties in sales of the games.
I still can't forget the time he was boasting his mouth off, back when he did an Xbox exclusivity deal for an Abe IP, and that also neglected other systems including PC at the time.
Guy is not at all bright with his business decisions, and he runs his mouth off quite a bit in public.
Potentially a glimpse of what might happen to gamepass once it reaches higher userbases.
This is the risk with launching on a sub service that has a 50%+ attachment rate. on PS5 it was probably closer to 80%.
Devs have said MS offers a variety of payment deals with GamePass. Maybe Sony does too, but all I have ever seen are these lump sum payments.
On GamePass they could have negotiated for a per download payment system but who knows if MS would have done it. They also do time played payments and lump sum and maybe others.
I think Lanning is upset because he saw the number of downloads (through +) as a potential loss of sales even though he openly admitted they were looking to sell about 50k units. sony gave them a lump sum of what equals 100k units in order to put the game on + and the game went on to be downloaded by millions. If he wasnt happy about it... he shouldnt have taken the deal.
Word of mouth says its not a very good game and those millions of users more than likely didnt even finish let alone even get into it.
That's what I was thinking. I haven't heard a single good thing about this game and Lanning might be thinking he missed out on 4 million sales, but bad worth of mouth would've caused sales to tank after initial release. It's not like Oddworld is a major selling IP either, so this title would've needed to have been the best game in the series to reach those kinds of sales numbers.
It's unfortunate either way but it sounds like Lanning just didn't make the best deal. He lowballed his own game by quite a bit lol
Well if the game isn't well received and most who downloaded haven't played it, he actually over sold (if he received equivalent for 100k sales when he only though he would sell 50k), it is just that he is deluding himself that more people would pay for it because of the download number.
Honestly, with what they had they probably would have been happy to take a lump sum for equivalent to 140K units.
It's more multiple reasons tbf:
Bad word of mouth
Banking on one new console that was hardly on shelves/scalped to hell
Only sold on one PC store
Not on other consoles
Poor advertisement (one youtube vid afaik and that was it).
I guess Covid?, but I've seen and heard stories of devs getting better sales during the first 2 yrs of Covid, so his excuse doesn't hold a lot of weight if others smaller than him are able to succeed.
I claimed the game since it was a ps+ game, but haven't really had a desire to download and play it. If I run out of games in my backlog I may get to it.
Same here, I ended up downloading but not playing.
I find that funny, considering how he also limited it's launch on PC to EGS, and it's still not on Steam, so I guess he's just repeating what he did years ago with Xbox exclusivity back then.
He was never really good with his finances tbh, and this shows his poor decision skills.
His Covid excuse is a little bogus, considering how sales on consoles and stores like Steam got boosts from those playing indoors. Him banking on a brand new console that was hardly on shelves for a fixed amount of money was th worst deal to make.
From what we have seem posted on VGC gaming sales have benefited from covid, development was the one that took a hit and assembling hardware.
Dev for some took a hit for sure, but others adapted via working from home, and my guess is that he's great at boasting his ass off and not actually being able to fully manage a studio from home, that's just my guess.
Can`t disagree since that is most likely true =p
Maybe make a better game first before blaming the platform it released on. Oddworld didnt launch with great reception.
And also not limiting it to one single console (new one at that), and one PC store (one of the unpopular ones).
Guy should have focused on getting the game into as many hands as possible instead of as few.
I agree. The sour taste in his mouth. Imagine complaining about sales while being paid to keep it off other peoples hands.
He's done it before tbf, and he's also been on record for bitching about that too when he took an exclusivity deal for Xbox during the 360 gen.
Guy is just really bad at managing his finances, managing a studio (let alone from home), and doesn't see the road that far ahead. Devs like him that boast and talk the way he does don't exactly come off as sound business folk.
To me, it sounds like either he believes he could have gotten a better deal out of Sony (like a deal based on number of downloads), or he is making the mistake of thinking that the 4 million downloads = 4 million potential missed sales, which is just not realistic. If Ghost Of Tsushima took ~18 months to sell 8 million, there's no way Oddworld, with its average reception, would have gotten close to 4 million. It's more like millions of people that wouldn't have bothered checking the game out at all had it been priced, gave the game a try.
And here I thought that offering games for free made they sell more.
I hadn't heard anything good about this game when it launched nor have I even heard its name mentioned since launch. I doubt most of those 4 million claims have even played the game to begin with and they definitely didn't spread good word of mouth either. There was no buzz about this game whatsoever and Lanning lowballed his own game when he made the deal with Sony.
I have downloaded but didn't play yet. Still doesn't remove the claim that giving for free improve sales as we hear from people here.
No, of course not. By default it will always hurt raw sales. Definitely no getting around that fact lol. The developer just has to hope they got a good deal out of an upfront lump sum or they make a deal to get a certain portion from the monthly subscription revenue from the platform the game is on.
Exactly and that it may help the sales of a sequel, and sure if they have a good game with good word of mouth plus DLCs along the way it may get additional revenue from the people that got it for free.
Actual devs have said it, which is far more credible than “people here”.
Also who here ever said that every game on + or Gold sells more because of it, lol
Always will be a risk when you release your game day & date on service. Devs need to do their homework and determine what’s best for them.
I just added it on my ps plus and didn't bother to download a garbage game,
4 million downloads doesn't equate to 4 million sales what a load of hogwash
I claimed all available just in case.
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