Subnautica
Profile updated
Players navigate an underwater open-world environment, managing resources and survival needs. This title launched in 2018 and maintains a 96% positive rating across 177,587 Steam reviews. It functions as a self-published release within the indie category, consistently demonstrating high user engagement metrics since its initial debut.
Overview
Subnautica is a 2018 Adventure game developed by Unknown Worlds Entertainment and published by Unknown Worlds Entertainment. On Steam it has gathered 332,025 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 $30. The pairing of developer Unknown Worlds Entertainment with publisher Unknown Worlds Entertainment 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 model estimates its lifetime sales at roughly 17.9 million to 41.8 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, Subnautica can be compared against similar Adventure titles and benchmarked on review counts and estimated sales.
Reviews
332,025
Positive
97%
Steam appid
264710
Engine
n/a
Sales estimate
vv1.017.9M to 41.8M
units (median: 29.9M)
≈ $307.1M to $716.6M net revenue (Steam cut + refunds + regional discount applied)
indielist estimates lifetime unit sales for Subnautica at roughly 17.9 million to 41.8 million copies, with a median around 29.9 million, derived from its 332,025 Steam reviews using a multi-factor Boxleiter model (version v1.0). That median maps to approximately $511.9M 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
90d · low $16.54Over the last 90 days the price ranged from $16.54 to $29.99, averaging $27.42 across 3 discount windows, with a historical low of $16.54 on 2026-04-10.
Synthetic series for demo. Real ITAD price history loads after Day 3 ingest.
Where to buy
Affiliate disclosureLive prices from public feeds, cheapest first. Some are affiliate links — we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Learn more.
Platforms
macwindows
Tags
Open World Survival CraftSurvivalHorrorOpen WorldUnderwaterExplorationCraftingBase-BuildingSingleplayerAdventureFirst-PersonSci-fiMultiplayerSandboxAtmosphericAliensSurvival HorrorVRActionIndie
Frequently asked questions
- How many copies has Subnautica sold?
- indielist estimates Subnautica has sold between 17,929,350 and 41,835,150 units (median 29,882,250), derived from its 332,025 Steam reviews with the white-box Boxleiter vv1.0 method. The full breakdown is shown on the page.
- Who developed Subnautica?
- Subnautica was developed by Unknown Worlds Entertainment and published by Unknown Worlds Entertainment.
- When was Subnautica released?
- Subnautica was released in 2018.
- How many reviews does Subnautica have on Steam?
- Subnautica has 332,025 Steam reviews, of which 97% are positive.
Frequently asked questions
- How many copies has Subnautica sold?
- indielist estimates Subnautica has sold between 17,929,350 and 41,835,150 units (median 29,882,250), derived from its 332,025 Steam reviews with the white-box Boxleiter vv1.0 method. The full breakdown is shown on the page.
- Who developed Subnautica?
- Subnautica was developed by Unknown Worlds Entertainment and published by Unknown Worlds Entertainment.
- When was Subnautica released?
- Subnautica was released in 2018.
- How many reviews does Subnautica have on Steam?
- Subnautica has 332,025 Steam reviews, of which 97% are positive.
Ecosystem
Players looking for games like Subnautica can compare it on indielist against semantically similar Adventure titles such as No Man's Sky, Raft, Enshrouded, ranked by shared tags and genre rather than by ad spend. On the developer side, Unknown Worlds Entertainment's other releases and Unknown Worlds Entertainment's wider catalog are one click away, letting developers benchmark where Subnautica 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 Subnautica 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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