As it was published by Sony, it hasn't affected Housemarque in the same way financially, but it clearly intensified the soul-searching. Matterfall, another arcade-inspired title, arrived in August and similarly failed to set the world on fire. The studio has roughly 50 employees working on two games at any given moment, and doing some napkin math will quickly reveal that it lost a lot of money on the game, which it released without the help of a publisher.
The company confirmed that it's sold less than 100,000 copies of Nex Machina across both PS4 and PC. When I visited Housemarque's Helsinki studio last year, I described the game as " a Hail Mary for arcade shooters" - and it's now clear that the Hail Mary failed. It received universal praise from reviewers - a Metacritic average of 88 makes it the eighth-best-reviewed PS4 game of the year. Created in partnership with arcade legend Eugene Jarvis, it's fast-paced, devilishly challenging and with tight controls. Nex Machina, a colorful top-down arcade shooter released earlier this year, is pure Housemarque. In recent years, though, good reviews haven't been followed by strong sales. From the early PSN title Super Stardust HD to the PS4 launch savior Resogun, the Finnish studio has produced many critically acclaimed and commercially successful games. Over the past decade, the name Housemarque has become synonymous with arcade-style games.