Outriders - A Failed Game? [2021]
1Outriders is a cooperative action role playing third person video game developed by People Can Fly, formerly known as Epic Games Poland. The game was published by Square Enix, and was released on April 1st, 2021. The game received good reviews from game journalists while user reviews were mixed.
Looking at steam now on August 17th, we can see that it confirms what I've just said, regarding it's not so spectacular user review scores. Most criticisms about the game are about performance issues, bugs, game identity and the lack of endgame. Which from an outside perspective doesn't really give much confidence to the buyer. Considering the cost of the game being $60 USD, which is typically charged for a triple-A game this is somewhat disappointing..
The developers in a recent article suggested that they would obtain royalties from the game if they met certain milestones, by August 16th, 2021. No money was transferred to the developers accounts, which means that the game has failed in recouping its costs, supposedly. The publisher has basically implied to the developer that they don't have a net positive after selling supposedly 2 to 3 million units. The thing is, I'm personally doubting that. I think that developers are being screwed over by Square Enix. And I'll prove it to you with some basic math.
2,500,000 units multiplied by 60 dollars equals 150,000,000 dollars earned.
150,000,000 dollars multiplied by 70% equals 105,000,000 dollars (the 30% cut being from valve, and other platform costs).
Let's split that in two, for conservative measurements, which equals 52,500,000 dollars.
There are 350 employees at the development studio. Let's be generous and assume that they were all working on the game.
Dividing the amount of money by the number of employees equals about 150,000 dollars.
Let's divide that by 2, for 2 years of dedicated development, which is 75,000 dollars per employee for each year.
Now, there's still about 52 million dollars that I didn't include for the employees, because publisher costs. PR and marketing teams do cost a lot of money, usually about 25 to 50%. We can see how the publisher spent their money, by quickly checking the most popular gaming journals- and…. yup.
Even the developer is not willing to work with the publisher anymore, because of this. They haven't accused Square Enix, probably due to several compounding issues. Most likely, being able to keep a stable relationship with a huge publisher in the future.
At the end of day, I think… The game failed because it was trying to do too many things. I hope that the developers learned from working with publishers…
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