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Players investigate the fate of a merchant ship crew using a deductive logic mechanic. This title launched in 2018 and has accumulated 17,949 reviews on Steam. The game maintains a 96% positive rating, indicating strong reception within the indie sector.
Overview
Return of the Obra Dinn is a 2018 Adventure game developed by Lucas Pope and published by 3909. On Steam it has gathered 34,743 player reviews, 97% of them positive, which counts as a overwhelmingly positive reception among indie titles in the Adventure category. The game is available on mac, windows, and launched at $20. The pairing of developer Lucas Pope with publisher 3909 is one of the studio-publisher relationships indielist tracks, letting players find comparable games and letting developers and investors study how Adventure projects reach the market. indielist's white-box method estimates its lifetime sales at roughly 1.8 million to 4.1 million units, with the full Boxleiter factor breakdown shown on this page rather than a single black-box figure. Within indielist's catalog of indie games mapped to their studios, publishers, and funding, Return of the Obra Dinn can be compared against similar Adventure titles and benchmarked on review counts and estimated sales.
Reviews
34,743
Positive
97%
Steam appid
653530
Engine
Unknown
Players (snapshot)
304
Historical snapshot ·
Sales estimate
v1.01.8M to 4.1M
units (median: 3.0M)
≈ $20.2M to $47.2M modeled net revenue (fixed store-cut, refund, and regional-price assumptions applied)
+ - How is this calculated?
| Factor | Adjustment |
|---|---|
| base | +50 |
| year_2018 | +15 |
| price_$20 | 0 |
| positive_97% | +10 |
| genre_Adventure | +10 |
| final NB | 85 |
Heuristic display range: median × [0.6, 1.4]. Boundary protection: NB ∈ [15, 150].
Methodology & limitations
Sales estimates use an additive Boxleiter-derived heuristic against public Steam review
counts. They are not authoritative sales data, and the fixed display range
is not a statistically validated confidence interval. Actual results may fall outside it,
especially for deeply discounted or bundle-heavy titles. Algorithm version
v1.0. Read the exact method and validation status.
indielist estimates lifetime unit sales for Return of the Obra Dinn at roughly 1.8 million to 4.1 million copies, with a median around 3.0 million, derived from its 34,743 Steam reviews using a multi-factor Boxleiter method (version v1.0). That median maps to approximately $33.7M in net revenue after Steam's 30% cut, regional pricing, and refunds. Unlike black-box trackers, the full calculation is shown on this page: a base review-to-sales multiplier is adjusted for release year, launch price, review sentiment, studio size, and genre, and every adjustment is listed so developers, publishers, and investors can audit exactly how the figure was reached. The range itself reflects genuine uncertainty — review-to-sales ratios vary widely between games — so indielist publishes a low, median, and high band rather than a false-precision single number, and treats free-to-play, heavily discounted, and bundle-distributed titles as having wider error margins still.
Price history
54 observed days · window low $11.99Across 54 observed UTC days from 2026-05-15 to 2026-07-22, the daily lowest tracked USD price across stores ranged from $11.99 to $19.99. The tracked-window low was $11.99 on 2026-05-31.
Real store observations · daily lowest tracked USD price across stores · missing days are not filled.
Where to buy
Affiliate disclosureLatest tracked store observations (2026-07-22 21:14 UTC), cheapest first. Prices may have changed since observation. Some are affiliate links — we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Learn more.
Platforms
macwindows
Tags
DetectiveMysteryPuzzleStory RichAtmosphericSingleplayerIndieGreat SoundtrackFirst-PersonHistoricalAdventureNavalDifficultRetroMultiple EndingsViolentPiratesHorrorWalking SimulatorNoir
Frequently asked questions
- How many copies has Return of the Obra Dinn sold?
- indielist estimates Return of the Obra Dinn has sold between 1,771,893 and 4,134,417 units (median 2,953,155), derived from its 34,743 Steam reviews with the white-box Boxleiter v1.0 method. The full breakdown is shown on the page.
- Who developed Return of the Obra Dinn?
- Return of the Obra Dinn was developed by Lucas Pope and published by 3909.
- Who published Return of the Obra Dinn?
- Return of the Obra Dinn was published by 3909, developed by Lucas Pope. See 3909's full catalogue and submission status on indielist.
- When was Return of the Obra Dinn released?
- Return of the Obra Dinn was released in 2018.
- How many reviews does Return of the Obra Dinn have on Steam?
- Return of the Obra Dinn has 34,743 Steam reviews, of which 97% are positive.
- Is Return of the Obra Dinn worth playing?
- Steam players rate Return of the Obra Dinn 97% positive across 34,743 reviews. indielist doesn't score games editorially; it surfaces public review sentiment and a white-box sales estimate so you can judge reception and reach yourself.
Ecosystem
Players looking for games like Return of the Obra Dinn can compare it on indielist against semantically similar Adventure titles such as What Remains of Edith Finch, The Witness, Firewatch, Papers, Please, ranked by shared tags and genre rather than by ad spend. On the developer side, Lucas Pope's other releases and 3909's wider catalog are one click away, letting developers benchmark where Return of the Obra Dinn sits among a studio's body of work and how its publisher's portfolio performs. Because indielist maps studios, publishers, games, and funding into one connected graph, the same Return of the Obra Dinn page serves three audiences at once: players hunting their next Adventure game, developers studying how comparable projects were positioned and what they sold, and investors tracing which teams and labels are active in the space. A machine-readable markdown mirror of this page is published at the same path with a .md suffix for AI assistants, and its review, price, and sales-estimate figures are refreshed on a schedule rather than frozen at launch.
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