selling sequels is hard but god if any big budget game deserves the bucks it's that one
Animation Lead on Wanderstop! She/Her & Transgenderrific! Past: Radial Games, Gaslamp Games
selling sequels is hard but god if any big budget game deserves the bucks it's that one
I've heard nothing but good things about this game and it's apparently selling really well, good lord how much did it cost to make?
The game's budget seems to have been 50 million EUR for development and 20 million EUR for marketing, for 70 mil total.
At a price of ~50 euros per copy, 1.2 million copies = ~65 million EUR in sales, minus the 30% cut that every store except epic on PC takes is 45 mil, which is about 65% of the game's budget. Napkin math but it tracks with what they're saying.
By the way, based on this math the safe assumption seems to be that the break-even point would be about 2 million copies sold. They mention that Control sold 4 million so if that happened here eventually they'd be in pretty good shape (though obviously you have to take sales/discounts into account with any long tail)
They say this is the fastest-selling Remedy game ever, which would imply that it's outperforming Control at this stage of its life cycle. Which seems wild to me if you tell me Control sold 4 million copies lifetime, that's a pretty healthy long tail.
Adding some interesting colour to this:
We know that as of March 2023, Control had sold 3 million copies (according to its publisher) which would suggest that 2023-4 accounts for a full quarter of the game's sales, something like 5 years after it originally came out. I'd be really curious to know how that happened. Deep discounts? Alan Wake 2 causing a back catalog bump?
We also know that Control's budget was 30 mil euro, or less than half of Alan Wake 2's, so wow was that game profitable