Soma generates profit on 450k sold

Despite having a budget "well over 10 times" that of Amnesia, Soma managed to turn a profit for Frictional Games, the studio has revealed in a detailed blog post on the horror game's sales a year after release. While Amnesia was an exclusive on the PC, Soma had a PS4 SKU and it also was bundled in with a Humble Bundle this month, meaning that those purchases aren't direct sales. Looking at everything lumped together, Frictional said that the sales total eclipsed 450,000, a good deal higher than Amnesia's 390,000.

"This is quite good, in fact it is so good that we have now broken even and then some! I think it is worth to stress just how great this is," the developer remarked. "We spent over five years making our, by far, most ambitious game ever. We also spent quite a lot of money on various outsourcing such as voice acting, 3d models and animations. For instance, to make sure we got it right, we actually recorded a lot of the game's dialog three times. In the past we have just recorded voices at the end of the project and hoped for the best. With Soma we knew that nailing the voice acting would be crucial, and spent money accordingly. In the end, it meant that around half of our voice recordings were never used. The same thing was true for things like models and animations. We ordered a ton of these and as design changed many of them didn't make it into the final game. On top of that we also spent a lot on making live action clips for PR purposes. Taken together with salaries and all other kinds of expenses, Soma cost quite a bit to make..."

Frictional also talked about how Soma was far from a safe bet and discussed the difficulty of living up to expectations following Amnesia. In the end, Soma has become the studio's "most well-liked game we have ever made" and now the developer is able to expand its scope: "...our goal now is to be a two-project studio and so far it is going really well. One project, which most of the team is working on, is going to start production at end of the year and the other project is mid-way through the R&D stage. Unfortunately I cannot divulge any specific information on these two, and it will be a little while before there will be a proper announcement. However, we do have some smaller, cool stuff in store, one of each we will announced later this year."