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Dallinor on 06 August 2010
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Mr Puggsly said:
Dallinor said:
Mr Puggsly said:

I fail to understand why everyone keeps calling Alan Wake a flop. Its not done selling yet, its still full price, and holiday sales will give it a boost. It should hit 1 million by the end of the year. Legs and price cuts might take it to 2 million.

Worst case scenario, it should break even.


It's an exclusive title that took 5 years to make from Remedy, a developer whose past franchise sold over 7 million units. Worst case scenario would actually be Remedy losing money I'd imagine.

It's been discounted in Ireland and the UK. I can't speak for mainland Europe or NA.

But Remedy is a small development team of about 40 employees. MS has also been backing the project since 2006 and apparently had a lot of say. So if anyone loses money it'll likely be MS.

Anyhow, its only been out for 3 months and legs are still pretty good. I highly doubt they dropped a mega budget for a survival horror game. If anything, most of the money probably went to creating the game engine which will likely be used for other games. Sequels should be cheaper and faster to create.

True, Remedy are small. It's amazing really what they accomplished even if it did take a long time. As for MS losing money:

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=245729

Oskari Hakkinen painted a disaster picture for the developer if Wake doesn't sell.

He said: "We are betting the farm on [Alan Wake] and if this isn't a success we'll be selling hotdogs in Helsinki. Really."

"We were in a good situation after Max Payne 2 and we invested everything after selling the intellectual property and putting it back into the love of making videogames."

He added: "Everything's gone into this project so this will ultimately set us up for how we continue and how many videogames we can make in the future."

Legs aren't really great so far, as I mentioned in one of my posts above it's now selling on par with Infamous in NA, a title that's been out for 50 weeks longer. I'm not sure the sales will warrant an Alan Wake sequel, which will put Remedy in a tough situation. Much like Team Ninja after the relative lack of success of Heavenly Sword, I'd imagine they'd try to start work on a new IP as soon as possible and switch to multiplatform. But can they switch to multiplatforms with only 45 devs under their roof?

We can only speculate on what their financial situation is. It would be a crying shame if another independent developer were to fold though.