Ryuu96 said:
Step 1 - Don't be exclusive to Epic Game Store |
Yeah, that was definitely a blunder, but to be fair, Epic partially funded the game and published it for them, so it would have taken even more than 2m sales to break even if they had self published it.
It's sad to me how many people sleep on Remedy's games. Alan Wake 2 was 3rd place in 2023 GOTY tracking behind Baldur's Gate 3 and Zelda. It was all over The Game Awards winning other awards like Best Game Direction, Best Art Direction, and Best Narrative and had a live music performance there, an event watched by over 100m people. They did a co-marketing event with popular multiplayer game Dead By Daylight by making Alan Wake a survivor for the game and Saga a buyable skin for Alan. All of that marketing and it still took this long to sell 2m copies.
And people similarly passed on Alan Wake 1 (only sold 3.2m copies in the first 5 years), Alan Wake's American Nightmare (1.3m sold in the first 3 years) and Quantum Break (estimated to have sold somewhere between 1.9-2.5m copies lifetime). Even Control and May Payne only sold 4.5m and 4m copies respectively (as of 2024 for Control and 2009 for Max Payne 1), while Max Payne 2 sold substantially less than Max Payne 1, which was why Rockstar decided to drop Remedy and have their own studios make Max Payne 3.
Basically people have been sleeping on Remedy for their entire existence as a studio. They just barely scrape by, getting enough sales to keep the lights on and develop their next game, but never managing to grow their sales to the level needed to reach the upper echelons of AAA studios.
Last edited by shikamaru317 - 4 hours ago
Essay Pro