Just a whole lot of the timing not working out, there.
Sometimes, having a game get offered for free for a limited time can do wonders for sales; it boosts word of mouth, and can help shore up the playerbase, even if it being free doesn’t quite bring in money by itself. Other times, however, it probably won’t do a game any favors. Like when Oddworld: Soulstorm was one of the free games for PS Plus members the month the game launched (April 2021).
As Oddworld Inhabitants founder Lorne Lanning stated on the Xbox Expansion Pass podcast, the game was downloaded roughly 4 million times through the PS Plus promotion. Realistically, the studio really only figured between 50 and 100,000 members of the service would download it, and were sadly proven fairly wrong. And he thinks they missed out on a significant profit due to the deal.
Initially, the team was up against a number of issues. As Lanning said, they agreed to take the deal just 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.
Lorne Lanning
Lanning’s initial skepticism of the PS Plus deal was mostly down to the lack of PS5 consoles at launch, specifically in January 2021, which was when the game was originally set to launch. The team warmed up to the idea, though, and even thought they had made a good deal out of it.
However, due to the ongoing COVID pandemic, the game slipped a few months back and launched in April. And by that point, there were also more PS5 units in the wild, and by extension far more PS Plus users on PS5.
Because it slipped to April, we had the highest downloaded game on PS5 and it was, I think, approaching… close to four million units or something like that for free because they were all subscriptions. So for us, it was devastating.
Lorne Lanning
Even if you still consider the possibility that many of those who downloaded the game through PS Plus weren’t likely to have bought the game otherwise, it’s still something of a rough turn for them to take. That said, the deal wasn’t offered or executed in malice; As Lanning puts it, the deal was simply something of “a double-edged sword”.
Normally, however, these sorts of deals tend to work out pretty well. If a game’s sales have flagged after a few months on the market, of if they just need more players in the ecosystem, being free for a limited time can accomplish those goals, and add a flat rate chunk of change to a developer’s pocket.
Source: IGN
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