People Can Fly, the developer behind Outriders has not yet made a profit on the game, according to an investor note.
- READ MORE: ‘Abandoned’ creator Hasan Kahraman: “It’s not really a horror game – it’s not what people think”
Outriders launched earlier this year, with a prominent marketing push towards Xbox Game Pass. Subscribers were able to play the game on the same day it was released, which led to Square Enix labelling its launch a success with over 3.5million people playing the looter shooter a month after release.
People Can Fly is still due royalties from Square Enix, who will pass on profits from the title once the publisher has recouped its own costs for production, distribution, promotion and QA testing.
People Can Fly CEO Sebastian Wojciechowski stated in an investor note: “We do not have any sales figures for Outriders – we estimate sales to be between 2 and 3 million copies and we assumed that this result would make the project profitable already in the first quarter of sales.”
“The lack of payment from the publisher probably means that in Square Enix’s opinion, this is not the case after all. [A lack of royalty payment] may have been determined by some elements of Square Enix’s sales policy, the details of which we do not know,” added Wojciechowski. The policy the CEO refers to could be the inclusion of Outriders on Game Pass from day one.
According to SteamDB, Outrider’s player count has declined since it launched in April, although this is typical of most games. At launch, it had over 120,000 people playing the game on Steam. Yesterday (August 16), 1,722 people were playing the game. This doesn’t account for Game Pass subscribers, which will form the majority of the game’s player base.
Wojciechowski remains optimistic about Outriders and believes it will become profitable later this year: “We have the entire sales tail of the Outriders game ahead of us. We mentioned in the prospectus that we are working on further development support for this game and I hope that we will be able to tell you about the details soon.”
In other news, popular Twitch streamer Pokimane has shared her struggles with burnout and that she hopes to change her approach to work in the future.
The post ‘Outriders’ developer People Can Fly has not profited from the game yet appeared first on NME.
