SOMA has sold 250K copies, but isn't profitable yet

Developer Frictional Games marked the six-month anniversary of the release of its sci-fi horror game SOMA by delving into sales numbers and a frank, fascinating discussion of its future prospects.

Frictional has sold roughly 250,000 copies of SOMA across various platforms, which is still around 20,000-30,000 shy of what the dev needs to completely recoup costs for the game's five-year development. That said, the studio is still selling around 125 copies a day, so Frictional is optimistic that the game will pay for itself by the end of the year.

"One of the great things about funding SOMA 100 percent ourselves is that all money earned goes into our own pockets and is directly used to fund our upcoming projects," Frictional said in a previous post. "So we are under no pressure to recoup immediately so long as we get enough to keep going — which we certainly have now."

Though a solid performance, it's not quite a runaway success. As Frictional itself points out, Firewatch, a game of similar scope, sold 500,000 in a month. The postmortem outlines some theories for the slower sales, most prominently that SOMA hovers between sci-fi and horror, which the developer theorizes could have alienated fans looking for a pure genre experience.

There's plenty of other good insight in the piece, including why SOMA hasn't gotten the same response from modders as Franctional's Amnesia franchise and the revelation that the company is currently developing two new projects. You can find the whole postmortem right here.