The team behind Sea of Stars had an expectation of what the best-possible scenario for the game's success was, and turns out it was "seven times" more than that.
The Chrono Trigger-inspired indie RPG Sea of Stars was one of the highlights of 2023 – which is even more impressive when you remember how stacked that year was with indie titles like Pizza Tower, Cocoon, Dredge, and Venba. Not only did it pick up the award for Best Indie game at the Golden Joystick Awards and The Game Awards, but it hit four million players in under four months. Clearly it was a successful game, but turns out not even the devs figured it would be as successful as it was.
Speaking to Game Informer alongside the launch of its expansion Throes of the Watchmaker, the game's director Thierry Boulanger explains "for [Kickstarter] backers, as an incentive, we said, 'Oh, and you all will get the DLC for free when we end up making it.' And then what happened is, the game was about seven times more successful than we anticipated from the best sunny day scenario."
He adds: "We'd been given the means, essentially. So, the DLC is a 'thank you' lap for everyone who made it possible. Essentially, we can afford to just do it. We don't need to sell it to stay afloat. The game is doing well enough."
Asked about the "seven times more successful" comment, Boulanger elaborates: "I don't have the specific breakdown, but we're way past six million players at this point. Which, you can talk about players, or units, or whatever. I know for units, we did really well." He adds, "it's just a lot, lot more than we thought, especially coming from The Messenger, which, as we understand, there's kind of like a ceiling to a retro game, right? You're not expecting to see numbers like some AAA games are doing."
Boulanger notes that the game specifically did well on PS Plus, where the game launched day one onto the Extra subscription. He says: "It's not like Game Pass is quantity over quality or anything, but it's just that they have more. Their strategy is just to have more. Whereas PlayStation is keeping it a bit more contained. So maybe that means there's more visibility on each of the titles just because there's less to pick from when you play. We saw a lot of players there."
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