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In two months, the horror game "Alan Wake 2" produced by Remedy will celebrate its first anniversary of its release, but after winning numerous honors and awards, Remedy has still not been able to recover the development and marketing costs of the game to this day.

In Remedy's first-half 2024 financial report released on August 9, the company's CEO Tero Virtala mentioned that as of the time the financial report was released, "Alan Wake 2" had recovered most of the development and marketing costs. However, since the game has not yet fully recovered its costs, the game has not yet brought in royalties for the company at this stage.

Players who often follow Remedy's news should find it easy to find that they have been using this rhetoric for more than half a year. In February this year, Remedy published a post to celebrate the sales of Alan Wake 2 exceeding 1.3 million copies, becoming the company's fastest-selling game to date. At that time, Remedy CEO Tero Virtala said that "the game has recovered a large part of the development and marketing costs." Unfortunately, half a year later, Alan Wake 2 still has not escaped the stage of "recovering costs."

"A great game can achieve great long-tail sales, and we believe that this is also the case with Alan Wake 2"

At the end of 2023, Finnish media Helsingin Sanomat reported that the cost of Alan Wake 2 was about $75 million, including $21.5 million in marketing expenses. If we do some simple math, the 1.3 million copies sold by Alan Wake 2 have indeed recovered most of the costs, but selling games still requires considering promotional discounts and platform commissions. If all these miscellaneous items are taken into account, the day when Alan Wake 2 can really make a profit may be a long way off.

In fact, it is foreseeable that "Alan Wake 2" will have difficulty recovering its costs - "many people watch, few play" is a common problem in horror games. "Alan Wake 2" also weakens the gameplay, breaks up the dual narrative, and excludes players who have not been exposed to the previous game. The poor sales now may be an expected outcome.

Of course, Remedy certainly has not fallen to the point of making games at a loss. As early as March 2020, Remedy and Epic signed an exclusive distribution agreement. The agreement mentioned that Remedy will develop two games for Epic, including a 3A-level work, and Epic will be responsible for all development and marketing costs. After the game successfully recovers its costs and starts to make a profit, Epic will split the profits with Remedy 50-50. So from this point of view, "Alan Wake 2" is a completely profitable deal for Remedy.

But no matter what, working for others is obviously not what this maverick game developer wants. At the Summer Game Festival in June this year, Remedy announced that the physical deluxe version of "Alan Wake 2" will be released in the second half of this year. When the game was released last year, Remedy gave up the release of the physical version on the grounds of "controlling the price of the game". Now they have chosen to change their words, probably because they want to make more money through the physical version.

"A collector's edition has been highly requested by our fans, and the physical deluxe edition will help increase exposure for the game"

At a time when game development costs are rising, it is not uncommon to see games like "Alan Wake 2" that have difficulty in achieving profitability. How to balance the proportion of development and marketing costs to achieve the company's expected financial goals may be the problem facing 3A games in the new era.