Saros Sales Kick Off Short Of Predecessor Returnal With Only 300K Units So Far

Leading up to its release, Housemarque’s Saros has made several headlines. One of the namesake stories came when the Finnish game studio revealed the Reurnal successor to be its most-ambitious release to date. The acquisition was said to be its only reason the game was greenlit. The game also returned to the spotlight when reports disclosed Saros would be the first of new releases not intended to ship on PC after a half decade campaign for multiplatform releases.

So came Saros in late April and it has since said to be a well-tuned follow-up to Returnal. In our review, Rectify Gaming scored Saros a 9.5/10. “Saros is one of PlayStation’s finest action games and a strong candidate for 2026 Game of the Year conversations come December. […] The combat is the best in its class, the visuals stand among the PS5’s finest, the audio carries real weight, and the lead performance from Rahul Kohli is just the cherry on top.”

However, the game has yet to resonate with the greater PlayStation 5 user base it appears. Now recorded to sell over 93 million units, Saros is reported to only sell just over 300,000 units within its first two weeks. Alinea Analytics reveals the metrics in its recent Substack article on the post-mortem for Housemarque’s latest release.

“Saros hit PS5 on 30 April, with an advanced access period kicking off two days earlier. It’s a PS5 exclusive, and rumour has it that it’ll stay that way. In the two weeks since launch, Saros has passed 300K copies sold and generated over $22M in revenue. […] Niche exclusives now compete not just with other niche exclusives, but with the cumulative backlog of every previous Sony hit, plus the cross-platform releases the hardcore is also buying.”

Comparing metrics of player engagement with other major releases in the past month, Alinea Analytics shared that retention from Returnal was 78 percent for the game’s lifetime attendance on PlayStation. This number narrows to 17 percent for those who played Returnal in April ahead of Saros’ release. The report shares that one third of the copies sold were recorded during its early access window the last week of April.

What is more interesting is that the accessibility for players in Saros over Returnal has shown better engagement for the new title. “The playtime and completion data back that up as well. Our estimates show that 40% of Saros players have played for over 15 hours, and 30% for over 20 hours. […] Right now, over 20% of Saros players have finished the game (based on the Act 3 trophy completion). That’s double Returnal’s completion rate at this point.”

Are you surprised with Saros’ performance as of yet?

Source: Alinea Analytics