Four years ago, British game dev studio Kinetic Games put out a phenomenal spooky title that brought haunted houses to the comfort of your home.

What started as a quaint exercise in digital ghost hunting quickly became a global phenomenon, making Phasmophobia one of the most popular games in the world in 2020.

Leading the Steam best-selling list for three weeks in the middle of the Cyberpunk 2077 pre-release hype is a major achievement, but equally big is repeating that sales success four years on.

After finally making it to the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series X|S on October 29 of this year, Phasmophobia has joined the million-sale club on consoles.

The game took little over a month to cross that line, and a lot of the credit here goes to the developers for making sure the experience stays virtually unchanged despite the change in platforms.

Last week, Bloober Team's senior narrative director Barbara Kciuk explained in an interview with TheGamer why the horror genre offers such fantastic returns relative to other types of media.

While major titles like the Silent Hill 2 Remake pull all the stops to deliver in visual fidelity, it is the small time developers like Kinetic Games that make horror feel like alchemy.

By most accounts, including the public Trello board, releasing the early access of Phasmophobia took a single developer and two years of work.

Four years later, the game has sold north of 22 million copies across platforms at $20 per unit.

Kinetic Games has expanded quite a bit since 2020, but remains a small team with 14 employees as of this year.

While only the studio has the exact figures, public estimates like that of the Steam Revenue Calculator put Kinetic's net revenue for Phasmophobia at over $123 million. That is without factoring in console sales.

What keeps a game like Phasmophobia relevant is that its gameplay loop stays fresh thanks to clever level design, and the co-op element adds an extra layer of unpredictability.

A peek at the Steam charts shows that the game managed to cross the 50,000-player mark in November 2024.

This surge is below the peak in the first two months, where Phasmophobia hit over 100,000 concurrent players, but it is the 7th best month in the game's history.

The success of Phasmophobia and Kinetic Games serve as a reminder that making good games has more layers than just throwing money at the problem then firing staff if it underperforms. For that, we salute them.

Posted: Dec 07, 2024 11:08 pm
Related Forum: Xbox Forum

Source: https://www.dualshockers.com/phasmophobia-reaches-1-million-milestone-on-consoles/