Lorne Lanning, creator of the Oddworld series, said the addition of her newest game, Oddworld: Soulstorm, with PlayStation Plus, had a devastating impact on the game’s sales. Lanning doesn’t seem too happy about it.
Lanning told the Xbox Expansion Pass podcast that his studio Oddworld Inhabitants estimates that the free game with PS Plus will be downloaded between 50,000 and 100,000, but the game has reached over 4 million downloads. Lanning believes that this unexpected popularity has eaten away at the potential sales of the game, and that’s why the studio is generating huge revenue.
At first he thought the PS Plus deal was a necessity, but he was still undecided at first because of the low number of PS5 consoles. Ultimately, they decided it was a team and at the time they thought it was a good deal.
“It was less money than we could sell the most… We’d probably sell 50,000, maybe 100,000 on the way out. These were low numbers because there weren’t many PS5s on the market.”
However, shifting the game’s release date to April changed things. “Because we slipped into April, we were the most downloaded game on PS5; close to four million and completely free because they were all subscribers. So it’s been devastating for us.”
Under confidentiality agreements, developers can’t disclose how much they get from PS Plus deals, all we know is that Sony paid a one-time payment to add the game to the service. But as a similar example, Microsoft was said to have paid between $5 million and $10 million to add marvel;s Guardians of the Galaxy; i Game Pass.
