Saros Is Selling Slower Than Returnal – WGB

Sony’s latest exclusive has been out for about two weeks now, and according to the initial sales data, Saros is selling a little slowly.

Analytics firm Alinea has the relevant data, so, as always, don’t take their numbers as gospel truth, but the company has proven reliable in the past when it comes to sales stats. Usually, what they report ends up aligning well with official numbers when we get them.

According to Alinea’s newsletter by Rhys Elliott, Saros has sold over 300k copies in its first two weeks of release, bringing in about $22m in revenue for Housemarque and Sony, a small dent in its report $76 million budget.

A third of those copies, so around 100K, were from the early access period, meaning a third of the people who bought it were happy enough to shell out a little extra to play early. Those were probably the die-hard Returnal fans.

Speaking of which, Alinea says Saros is currently selling slower than Returnal did, even though Saros has around 93m PS5s in the wild, while Returnal only had about 8m consoles to sell itself to.

The newsletter does raise a few interesting points about why this might be the case, including that early PS5 adopters were hungry for something to play, which may have helped Returnal, whereas Saros has launched during a busy period and has to contend with the fact that PS5 owners have a lot to play these days.

The soft numbers are a little sad because Saros seems to be an excellent game, and Housemarque did a lot to make it a more welcoming and forgiving game than Returnal, likely in a bid to give it broader appeal. Still, there’s a chance that as word of mouth grows, it’ll become the kind of game that just keeps quietly selling in the background.

I have the disc sitting in my PS5, I just have not got around to playing it yet, and with the likes of Forza Horizon 6 and 007 First Light just around the corner, I admit that I’m struggling to find the motivation to play it.