Sins Of A Solar Empire sells 500,000. Expansion packs coming
Sins of A Solar Empire has sold over 500,000 copies. This includes 400,000 at retail and 100,000 via digital download.
The most impressive aspect though is not the sales numbers (although they are impressive in their own right) but the fact that the game cost under one million dollars to create.
“People were so surprised at how well Sins of a Solar Empire did,” explains Brad Wardell, CEO of Stardock. Starduck is the company that published the sci-fi RTS on the PC, which was developed by Ironclad Games. Although Stardock (Galactic Civilizations series) also had a high level of involvement with the game’s process and design.
Part of the success of Sins of A Solar Empire, according to Wardell, is due to the game being designed to ensure a wide potential audience. “Sins of a Solar Empire was explicitly designed to work on a wide variety of machines,” he says. “It will run on a four-year-old video card, and it looks great.” A good example of this is how the ship turrets don’t actually move, even if people would prefer that they did. However, this was a conscious decision by the developers. “Sure, we could have done that, but that requires higher-end hardware, and most people don’t even realize it doesn’t have that,” says Wardell. “You make those kinds of design decisions, and you greatly increase the number of people who can play your game. You lose out on some piddly super-mega effect, but you get those units. The results come in sales.”
Stardock has also announced that they will be releasing a trio of “micro-expansions” called “Entrenchment”. This will expand the game with new defensive structures and new battlefield options. You can defend your planets and mining outposts with massive new Starbases, platforms that bristle with weapons, armor and shields capable of defending an entire planet. And the new Subspace Inhibitor platform, a turret upgrade, will allow you to delay your enemies by slowing their fleets down, giving you a chance to reinforce and destroy them.
In addition they also shed some light on the two later expansions; One of which adds new diplomacy features to the game and another that will add new technologies and ships.
Entrenchment will be available in “late 2008″ and each pack will cost $9.95. Stardock has also revealed that they will be bundling all three as a compilation pack later next summer.
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