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[Thick Thighs Save Lives]

Mortal Shell, the Dark Souls-like action game from developer Cold Symmetry, has now sold one million units worldwide.

And that doesn't include players who have touched the game via subscription services, publisher Playstack says. Mortal Shell has featured on Xbox Game Pass and PlayStation Plus.

The game initially released on PC, PS4 and Xbox One in August 2020, before coming to PS5 and Xbox Series X and S in March the following year. A Nintendo Switch version also released in December 2022. The game was broadly well received, and it shot to 500,000 sales within the first nine months.

"In the final months leading up to Mortal Shell's release it became quite evident that the game was going to launch with a great deal of interest," said Playstack VP of Publishing Rob Crossley.

"We were starting to see superfans share tattoos of Mortal Shell characters, and we saw countless people theorise the game's whole storyline on our Discord, which itself had grown to 70,000 people within a few days. Our newsletter open-rate was illegally high too, around 60%."

Crossley said that these more community-oriented figures are a stronger indicator of a game's potential than wishlist numbers or followers on Steam.

"There's a great deal of work we put into the analytical side of PC games – we track wishlist velocity and follower health of every single Steam game, for instance – but we've learnt not to worship these numbers," he adds. "Some people definitely show too much reverence for wishlist data, for instance. There's no more reliable indicator for a successful game launch than an impassioned community. We saw that with Mortal Shell and we definitely see it with our next release, AK-xolotl, which is coming on September 14."

The secrets behind Mortal Shell's 1m sales

Mortal Shell, the Dark Souls-like action game from developer Cold Symmetry, has now sold one million units worldwide. A…

www.gamesindustry.biz

 

[Yoshichan]

Loved the idea of not knowing what an item did until you tried it out a few times.

Hated the rest of the game.

Grats to 1 mil!

 

[Kataploom]

Great game that didn't need to "push medium forward". Greatly enjoyed it.

 

[Giallo Corsa]

One of the few Souls clones that actually managed to have that FROM feel nailed down - impacts were meaty, sound effects were good etc etc.

The hardening mechanic was also really nice and it added another layer of complexity on top of the usual roll out of attacks®.
Graphics and atmosphere weren't bad either.

The Rotting Christ OST that was added/patched in later was the icing on the cake.

It's the most 7/7.5 out of 10 game of the last few years and I'm OK with that, I enjoyed it for what it was.

 

[digital_ghost]

 

[SlimeGooGoo]

 

[Draugoth]

Mortal Shell was originally released in Mortal Shell August 2020 and in the last three years, it has managed to beat that number of copies sold. In addition, the studio celebrates ten million players.

• Three Years
• One Million Units Sold
• Ten Million Players
• 90% Discount on all Platform

 

[Bernardougf]

Big souls fan here.. bought the game ... played 2 hours.. never touched again... is not good (imho)

 

[Salmon Snake]

I finished it but it's pretty bad. The last boss fucked up the camera so bad that all that I could see were my armored boots.
The Rotting Christ didn't work on PS5 while I played the game. I understand it's fixed but I'm not returning for it.

 

[Northeastmonk]

I disliked a lot of things about this game. Progression and combat felt like . When trying to find my own play style, the need to use the skin armor made me more anxious than parrying an attack in other games. I wanted to like it, but I didn’t want to put any more hours into it. I’m sure there was something good there.

 

[PanzerCute]

I really liked it. Some clever ideas and an interesting world, good gameplay too, although easy to break.

Congrats to the devs!

 

[ZVWQP-9B8TM-VH9CT]

This game is awesome. Also the setting and the atmosphere is wonderful.

 

[Bartski]

I beat it. Rather ok debut of an indie studo, I hated the harden mechanic and very mid-tier level design but it did sometimes look really nice. Keeping an eye on what they do next

 

[SmokedMeat]

Solid game. Glad it did well.

 

[Gandih42]

Decent game with some good ideas an a flawed execution. Beat it a few times to get the platinum and messed around with the DLC.

Biggest bummer was that I played the PS4 version from PS+, which meant I had to buy the special edition for PS5 and start my save over, if I wanted 60 FPS. So I played it on 30 FPS. I think it'd been a lot better otherwise, but I was in to deep when I realized.

Anyways, small Dev so I get it. Hope they move on to a new cool project with this news!

 

[Saber]

Its a mid-low tier type of Souls. The concept of shells is pretty interesting ,the take on harden is a new one and the roguelite mode is solid. But aside that, most of the rest falls short. Specially about enemies simply skipping animations when knock them, the last area, etc.