"Devastating" PlayStation Plus Free Game Called Out By Developer

Having a video game released via PlayStation Plus isn't always necessarily the best move, it turns out.

While games like Fall Guys and Deep Rock Galactic might have been able to find audiences they'd never normally have reached as a result of launching via PlayStation Plus, what works for one game doesn't always work for every game. This, evidently, was the case for Oddworld: Soulstorm.

As you may recall, Oddworld: Soulstorm was one of the free PlayStation Plus games for April 2021, and was something of a hit. But in a recent interview with Xbox Expansion Pass, Oddworld Inhabitants co-founder and president Lorne Lanning revealed that he felt the latest Oddworld games inclusion on Sony's subscription service was "devastating".

"It's a double-edged sword", Lanning said when asked for his thoughts on services such as PlayStation Plus and Xbox Game Pass, before launching into the story of how Soulstorm was negatively affected.

A number of factors, including financial issues, meant that development on Soulstorm was struggling. So when Sony offered the studio a deal to launch the game on PlayStation Plus in exchange for an undisclosed amount of funding, Lanning agreed.

He explained to Xbox Expansion Pass that he saw this as a pretty good deal. At this point, Soulstorm was supposed to launch in January 2021, just two months after the PlayStation 5 had launched. With the well-documented supply issues and stories of customers struggling to get a new-gen console, Lorne estimated that Oddworld Inhabitants would make more through the Sony deal than it would "lose" to free PlayStation Plus downloads of Soulstorm. "We needed the money to complete the project and we thought we'd done a pretty good deal," he said.

Unfortunately, COVID meant that Soulstorm was delayed out of January and into April - but the agreement to launch it on PlayStation Plus for free for a whole month was still in place.

With more PlayStation 5 consoles shifted in the period between January and April, Soulstorm ended up being downloaded by way more users than Lanning had anticipated. According to him, it became one of the most-downloaded games on PS5.

"Close to 4 million," Lanning lamented. "For free. Because they were subscription. So for us, that was devastating."

Soulstorm has since been released on other platforms, including Xbox Series X/S. However, he didn't touch on how the game's PlayStation Plus launch might have impacted those sales.