Sins of a Solar Empire Sells 500,000 Units

Sep 04, 2008 at 7:48 PM - -

16 Comments

400,000 copies were purchased at retail, with the remaining 100K sold via digital download:

Sins of a Solar Empire cost less than a million dollars to make, and recently passed its 400,000th unit sold full-price at retail -- and has racked up over 100,000 units sold via digital distribution, it's been revealed to Gamasutra.
"People were so surprised at how well Sins of a Solar Empire did," explains Brad Wardell, CEO of Stardock, who published the sci-fi real-time strategy title on PC -- although Ironclad Games is the developer, Stardock (Galactic Civilizations series) had a high level of involvement with the game's process and design.

Topics: Games: Space Strategy
Related Games: Sins of a Solar Empire (PC)

wheezal

Sep 5 2008, 11:29 AM

these guys deserve huge bundles of success. they work hard and put out consistently high quality products.

GalCiv II, Space Rangers, and Sins we're all excellent and worth every penny.

SL1ce

Sep 5 2008, 10:31 AM

I don't think pirates are of any worry. :)

We are pleased with the games success, but we need to keep in check retail and distribution cuts, and investment into patching, and future projects. When it comes down to it at this size we are still very concerned about pirates and the destruction they are doing to our industry. Increasing pirate activity attracts more people, who may have purchased the game, to pirate. That takes away from what we can invest into our next title.

BiffaBacon

Sep 5 2008, 3:41 AM

Damn well done to them, it's a cracking game and this is well deserved.

Articwind

Sep 4 2008, 11:21 PM

Completely unrelated, but 80% of the copies of this game were retail. If a game like this sells most of it's copies from retail, it's safe to say that your average gamer is still buying retail copies of games and that digital distribution isn't nearly as big as many would lead you to believe.

nomicro replied to Articwind's post

Sep 5 2008, 12:38 AM

Remember 20% is 100k copies. That's pretty significant for a distribution method that didn't even really exist a decade ago except for shareware. While it's not the dominant distribution method yet, it has a very impressive growth rate.

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B_Sisko replied to Articwind's post

Sep 5 2008, 12:39 AM

To be fair though, when i bought Sins of a Solar Empire I didn't recall a Digital Distributed version out at the same time. It was only later that I saw it available on Impulse because of the BETA patches.

HorrorScope2 replied to Articwind's post

Sep 5 2008, 7:28 AM

I looked at that as well and every measure helps determine. The question I have is when were you able to digitally download it? If it was months after release then that would explain it. I'm not sure though. I think I've finally tipped the scale in preferring the digital download over the box and that is a pretty recent change. It all depends though, some games you can only get one way or the other as well.

born2expire

Sep 4 2008, 10:10 PM

Awesome, Glad to hear the little guy doing well! Sadly Sins doesn't appeal to me, but good news none the less.

Killswitch

Sep 4 2008, 10:06 PM

i havent bought Sins of a Solar Empire , but i'll probably get it soon now. These guys here are in a completely different situation, their expectations were reasonable. they went for the harcore market, and the press reacted well to their game. Props to them. Few would risk that right now.

Killswitch

Sep 4 2008, 10:02 PM

crytek, on the other hand, had big expectations, and crysis, we've seen here, cost a lot to make (22usd millions?). but what i dont get is, they know what they were into, piracy is a big problem ok, but, they 'knew' that before releasing crysis, they had also a lot of funding from nvidia i'm willing to bet, nvidia used crysis a lot to promote their stuff and microsoft probably too with dx10. And let's not forget the nvidia team that helped the crytek dev team.

i was more than happy to buy my copy of crysis, justa had a brand new computer, but then, after hearing them mourn over the potential losses, the bad bad pirates, how much more money they should have made when compared to cod4, and them cutting the support from weekly to monthly, and then again stopping all patching because of warhead, i'm honestly not all that tempted to buy warhead. i guess i wouldnt care if i pirated the game but now i'm just feeling like, whatever man, i'll probably get warhead on torrents, screw those ****ing lamers. they keep 'CRY'ing even after i support them. No more pc exclusive blah blah blah. Well then , **** OFF. Good ****ing riddance.

i'm probably a case of a big crysis fan turned wrong :)

Woebringer

Sep 4 2008, 9:00 PM

Someone should forward this to Crytek.

scyphe

Sep 4 2008, 8:59 PM

SoaS shows that severe anti-piracy protection isn't the way to go. If anything it spurs the groups to crack it even faster and put it out. If a game is not cracked it will consequently never show up on the "0-day" sites where pirated games spread out to various outlets all over the internet. It does not mean piracy isn't a problem, it sure is, but as I've said before, it's the attitudes of gamers that they need to change, not invent increasingly difficult draconian protection schemes that get cracked in a day anyway or chase pirates/gamers with police and pitbull's. That just pushes the gamers in the wrong direction.

SirKnight6

Sep 4 2008, 8:53 PM

At $40 a copy, that's 20 million dollars. With the production costing less than 1 million...damn that's nice. With that kind of profit, I don't think pirates are of any worry. :)

I just wonder how well it would do for them if they then put this game on Xbox Live Arcade and PS Online. With the profits they just made, paying for the dev kits and whatnot to do this would be cake. Unless the cake is a lie of course. hehe. ;)