Alan Wake 2 has not made back its development costs, despite being Remedy’s fastest-selling game ever – WGB

Despite being Remedy’s fastest-selling game to date, Alan Wake 2 has not made back its development costs, according to Remedy themselves.

The news comes via the company’s latest financial earnings where the Finnish developer announced that Alan Wake 2 has sold 1.3m copies to date. A million of those copies were achieved in 2023, with another 300,000 being sold by the beginning of February.

According to Remedy, this makes Alan Wake 2 their fastest-selling game ever, shifting 50% more copies in its first two months on the market than Control did in its first four months. Control is still the company’s best-selling game, mind you, having managed to sell 4 million copies since it launched in 2019, bringing in approximately $107 million.

But despite doing well relative to Remedy’s previous games, it seems Alan Wake 2 hasn’t made back its development and marketing costs yet.

“The price point has also remained at a high level, and the game has already recouped a significant part of the development and marketing expenses,”  Remedy CEO Tero Virtala said. “We will continue to develop the game to serve existing fans and attract new players and expect the game to continue selling well.”

It’s a position Remedy is extremely familiar with. Despite producing numerous critical darlings, they’ve typically struggled on the commercial side of the equation. Alan Wake 2 scored highly among critics and took home a handful of trophies at the Game Awards 2023, and yet the commercial response has been much more subdued.

It’s difficult to say exactly why this is. The most obvious answer might be that Alan Wake 2 launched in an incredibly busy period that featured big-hitters like Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 and Super Mario Bros. Wonder. It could also be because Remedy’s cerebral, often crazy concepts connect strongly with a small selection of gamers who love their work. Personally, I think it’s nice to see games hit hard among a certain audience rather than trying to appeal to everyone, but there’s no denying that it can come at the cost of sales.

Being exclusive to the Epic Store on PC may have also factored into the equation. While plenty of people do use Epic, Steam remains the biggest storefront on PC by lightyears.

Much like Control and the original Alan Wake though, I fully expect Alan Wake 2 to become a cult classic that slowly but surely sells copies.

Attempting to break down the numbers a little more, in 2023 Finnish outlet Helsingin Sanomat claimed that Alan Wake 2 had a budget of around $75 million, a significant step-up from Control’s budget of around $30 million. If we assume every copy of Alan Wake 2 sold for its RRP of $50 (a big assumption, but we are working with rough math) then it has generated approximately $60 million thus far, leaving another $15 million to go.

Based on past financial disclosures, we also know that Epic, who co-funded the creation of the game, will take all of Alan Wake 2’s revenue until it breaks even, at which point it will take 10% and Remedy will pocket the other 90%.

With Alan Wake 2 out the door, the focus has now turned to its upcoming expansions, but those require a smaller team. Remedy currently has four other projects being worked on: Control 2, a remaster of the first two Max Payne games and Project Condor, a four-player co-op spinoff of Control. With staff now moving on from Alan Wake 2, Remedy says these projects “have all increased development pace.”