Hellblade has moved into profit after hitting 500K sales

Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice has reached 500,000 sales in its first three months, beating internal expectations and moving the game into profit. 

The digital-only title racked up half of those sales on PC (presumably meaning the other half were on consoles). Impressively, Ninja Theory only expected to have shifted 500,000 copies after six months, meaning the company has smashed that initial target. 

While that's obviously good news, the studio is particularly pleased as it suggests indie titles with triple-A sensibilities are indeed commercially viable. 

"Creatively we hit a home run, but our other major goal was to prove that there was a space between indie and triple-A games that could work commercial. And for that, sales do matter," explained the dev in a video diary.

Hellblade launched on August 8 and sold 250,000 units across PS4 and PC during its first week on sale, eventually becoming the top selling title on the European PlayStation Store in August. 

The game took a team of around 20 people roughly three years to develop, and has to date generated $13 million in revenue. According to Ninja Theory, sales are still going strong. 

"The escalating stakes in the AAA retail publishing model has killed off countless independent studios like us, many smaller publishers, and is now straining even the largest of publishers.  This isn't survival of the fittest but a routing of the creative base upon which this industry was built," added the studio. 

"The future isn't written and we don't believe that the writing is on the wall.  AAA will always exist but we need strong alternatives as well. Three years ago we announced our intention to find a way to do our best work outside of the AAA retail model and have openly documented the journey in our thirty development diaries.

"The final step is to share our commercial model and digital sales data for the benefit of other developers.  The more data we have for alternative business models, the more developers can take informed commercial and creative risks."