As platform owners step up the importance of subscription services, Oddworld Inhabitants bigwig Lorne Lanning has outlined the PSPlus treat as “devastating”. The industry veteran, whose company released Oddworld: Soulstorm on Sony’s sub on the PS5, was speaking candidly as part of a xbox podcastsand while he clarified that PlayStation was not to blame, he is clearly dissatisfied with the way things turned out for his team’s game.
In the meandering interview, explains that the developer needed financial support to finish his remake of Oddworld: Abe’s Exoddus, so he signed a deal with Sony to release the game on PS Plus on day one. He doesn’t reveal the financial details of the deal, but reading between the lines it appears the team was paid a flat fee, ultimately giving him a monetary security blanket to wrap up production.
However, when he signed the deal, he was confident that the PS5 was still relatively new when it hit its planned January 2021 release window; It turns out that a global pandemic drastically affected global workflows, and the game was pushed back to April 2021. This gave Sony an extra three months to sell PS5 consoles, which meant that in the end there were more consoles, and therefore , PS More subscribers: In the market than the inhabitants of Oddworld had anticipated.
The result is that a whopping four million people downloaded the game as part of Sony’s subscription, but full-price sales were significantly lower than anticipated. As such, the developer was devastated, because while it did receive a satisfactory lump sum payment from PlayStation, it appears that the PS Plus period directly impacted launch sales. Of