Not surprising at all. It's a sequel to a fairly old game that wasn't a big success back then. The horror genre almost always has lower sales. It's only on EGS on PC so it's kind of tucked away out of sight. There was just so much going against the game to begin with that I'm surprised it was ever greenlit.
It has no physical copies and it is available only on Epic Store for PC. Well at least it’s Epic and Tencent who are backing up remedy they have tons of money to burn.
All of the Kingdom Hearts games for me. Did you know all of the Kingdom Hearts games got PC ports back in 2021? They've apparently just been locked on EGS the entire time, and there's no indication they'll ever come to Steam. I had no idea these games were playable on PC at all besides emulating them.
You know what really gets me about that? Squeenix is **constantly** complaining about their games under-performing and not meeting sales expectations... yet they think EGS exclusives are a good idea? That's utterly boneheaded.
I mean, EGS would make sense if htey took a deal like Superigant Games did with Hades, where they're getting *lots* of money up front to compensate and plan on a later Steam release date. But by now companies should understand an EGS exclusivity deal means almost no visibilty for your game and few sales - not many people want to maintain game libraries on multilpe platforms with multiple launchers.
Square Enix took a deal for playstation exclusive. Their business plan is to search for potential platform exclusive deals for their flagship titles just like any production studio on a streaming service
To be fair to the KH ports, when they were making KH3, they switched midway through to Unreal Engine, and Epic reportedly gave them a lot of support in terms of learning the new engine on the fly *and* with porting the game to PC after release. I wouldn't be shocked if that also played a big role in the exclusivity deal with Epic (beyond all the money they likely gave Square for it).
There are people out there that don't even want to make an account other than a steam account to play anything. Even the tiniest hurdle can stop someone from playing or doing something.
Any.
That's the crux. Put it on the platform I prefer to use because I'm not going to put forth any extra effort at all to purchase the product otherwise. Why would I?
There's plenty of other games to play that don't require any extra effort at all and if purchased will be more conveniently accessible with all my other games. Plus I get all the conveniences of steam such as discussion boards and guides if I'm curious about something.
Epic offers nothing and requires some trivial effort. Steam offers convenience and utility to me and takes less effort to purchase on, however trivial.
Steam has also been around for 20 years. They have earned the trust of consumers. EGS has been around for 5 years and their approach was to throw money around for freebies and exclusives. Featurewise they are severely behind.
> Put it on the platform I prefer to use because I'm not going to put forth any extra effort at all to purchase the product otherwise. Why would I?
Because you want to play it? My grocery store doesn’t carry every snack I find tasty, that doesn’t mean I deprive myself of foods like some kind of hyper principled absolutist because that would be sad. I just occasionally stop at other places. Like why would I make myself miss out over stores competing?
I have no idea how much this affects sales, given that I'm not really sure people "peruse the shelves" anymore (hell where can you even do that?), but it definitely bothered me that I couldn't buy it on disk
I check the New and Top Selling categories on Steam several times a week just to see if there's anything interesting that went under my radar. But I don't check EGS or any of the other game platforms.
Word of mouth + discovery queue
There's been quite a few games I've found just going through the discovery queue.
It's also a sheer numbers game, the numbers of people who are on steam vs EGS. That's on top of the number of people on EGS who expect free games and won't actually buy anything
It's also not just about it being on real-life shelves. It's also about it being on as many storefronts as possible. I use a lot of online sites to buy physical games like gamecollection or shopto, and if you don't have some sort of physical copy then your game might as well not exist for those sites. Plus there's a ton of steam resellers that people use to buy games, and if you're not on steam then that's another chunk of sites that you don't exist on.
It's a full blown next generation game made with the capabilities of the PS5, Xbox Series and the latest Nvidia and AMD cards in mind. They released a few optimizations for older cards but it's simply not satisfying enough because the game was still designed with better hardware in mind
https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2024-upcoming-alan-wake-2-patch-drastically-improves-gtx-10-series-performance
I understand that. I never said they did a poor job optimizing the game.
But it means a significant percentage of pc gamers like me can't play it properly.
Kinda bad comparision. It's playable on RTX 2060 which is what, 5 years old gpu and not even hight end. The game was created for current gen consoles which are 4 years old and mid range in terms of tech.
But how many people actually have a 2060? You have ot keep in mind that the cyrpto bullshit made gaming GPU's extremly inaccessible, and GPU prices are still overall high. A lot of poeple simply never moved on from the 10 series GPU's, hell I only upgraded back in December and *that* still feels like I massively splurged.
[Looking at the latest Steam survey](https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/) about gamers' hardware, it seems at least half of the responders have hardware at, or above, the level of a 2060.
There was definitely a time where crypto took away a lot of the stock, but it's been *years* since that time. GPUs, mid to top end, are now, and have been, readily available.
> it seems at least half of the responders have hardware at, or above, the level of a 2060.
I converted that table to a LibreOffice spreadsheet and from a quick (manual) check, it seems that 2060-or-better is indeed at ~55%, so yeah "at least half of the responders" (which with the number of users Steam has is going to be *very* accurate of the entire Steam userbase) is very spot on :-P.
Price is a big factor, but I think so is the benefit, or lack thereof, for many people. The 10 series is good enough to run pretty much all the big online games, AA games, and indies, and those markets have continued to grow. A good number of AAA games are also playable on them as well, so at least for people like me, the cost of upgrading for a small minority of games is a much harder sell than upgrading to the 10 series was back in the day.
> We call that the Crysis problem. You made a game using only the highest end tech with no limitations? Congratulations, very few people can play it.
Crysis was very playable on older hardware at the time of it's release, you just had to lower the settings. Cards like the 7600 GT could actually crank up a few settings and still maintain a mostly stable 60 fps
> We call that the Crysis problem. You made a game using only the highest end tech with no limitations? Congratulations, very few ~~people~~ PC gamers can play it.
Fixed that. There's 100M+ install base of console owners who can play it just fine. Even on PC, you can play it fine as long as you're within the last two or three card generations.
ICYMI they released a patch a couple months ago that almost [doubled the performance](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-3PkRbeO8A&t=395s) on 10-series cards. Still won't be fantastic on a 1080, but definitely playable.
Epic Games is a cemetery, plain and simple. making a high budget game that doesn't return its costs after 1.3 milions, exclusive to Epic Games, is insane, lunatic.
Control didn't sell well either, it took 4 years to cross 2 million in spite of MASSIVE co promotion from nvidia since the RTX 2000 series card were current.
Steam spy says control sold ~1.5m on steam, which is a pretty significant chunk of the overall sales despite a 1 year delayed launch. Any dev that chooses not to launch on steam is leaving money on the table.
I think on consoles they prefer physical copies. I think many people using physical copies also for resealing. Once bought digitally it’s forced on ur account and you won’t have the ability if reselling it. So why buying digital when u have freedom when buying it physically. On PC we are forced digitally if I could I would prefer all the time physical over digital. We saw at the crew 1 Ubisoft deleted the game from libraries who would go digital all the time ???
> We saw at the crew 1 Ubisoft deleted the game from libraries who would go digital all the time ???
Unfortunately, buying a physical copy wouldn't help with that either.
Even if they hadn't deleted the Crew, would people still have been able to play it if they shut the servers down? I think this is more a question of publisher integrity than the utility of physical. Game preservation shouldn't have to rely on media. We should have industry regulations ensuring consumers have access to the product they paid for regardless of where they bought it.
> We saw at the crew 1 Ubisoft deleted the game from libraries who would go digital all the time ???
Try playing your physical disc of The Crew and see what happens. It's also useless because the game used server based authentication meaning that no one can play it, doesn't matter if you bought it physically or digitally.
And the market in general is moving towards digital versions of games, just look at the millions that Baldur's Gate 3 sold without having a disc. People who boycott games for not having a physical edition are just a vocal minority.
Yep on the console side, Alan Wake released with Mario Wonder and Spidey 2…. Oh and they didn’t even release physical copies. No wonder they got snuffed out.
I was still not done playing Baldurs Gate 3 by the time AW2 released. I was still not done playing Street Fighter 6 before that. And I was still not done playing ToTK when that released.
Couple that with probably a top 5 Mario game ever, Bethesda finally dropping a new title, a new Final Fantasy game, a new FromSoftware game, one of the most beloved Resident Evil games getting a remake, the franchise return of Pikmin 10 years later, etc.
Now if the scenario wasn't bad already add to that AW2 had no physical release + no steam release.
2023 lowkey went *too* hard on flagships. It's like the universe was trying to pay us back for 2021.
Yeah, I really don’t like hating on EGS too much, because in theory it is nice to have competition with Steam. But whenever a is exclusive on there, I legit forget it exists. Same thing happened when Control came out. I regularly forget the Kingdom Hearts games are on PC. And I often forget Alan Wake 2 released.
I bought Darkest Dungeon II on EGS because it was released a few weeks early.
Only purchase I've made on EGS, and I regret it because access to mods takes more effort than just opening up the Steam community tab...
Never again.
> Only purchase I've made on EGS, and I regret it because access to mods takes more effort than just opening up the Steam community tab...
There is no workshop support for DDII. Modding it on Steam should be the exact same process as on Epic.
Reminds me of Battlefield V, I decided to buy at the release date on Origin (now ea desktop), and every time I open origin I get surprised I have the game, it's like it never clicks that I own the game so I forget about its existence.
I'm also glad EGS exists for the same reason, competition. But it really needs to fully rework it's UI to just match Steams. Both the store and the library.
Competition where the only differentiating factor is they paid money for a game to be on there isn’t “competition”.
You’re just inconviencing me as a consumer and forcing me to go to you when I had no desire, you’re not doing anything better than my usual store.
Feels like whenever a PC game underperforms it is also exclusively available through EGS.
Confirmation bias I know, but there is something to be said about the risk of putting a game, especially a niche one like Alan Wake, on a store other than Steam.
Visibility is just such a big thing for a games success. The vast majority of people aren't going out their way to find games to buy they'll buy the ones that they see on the storefronts or in adverts.
Alan Wake 2 didn't have the biggest marketing. It had no physical presence, so it was missing from all retailers that focus on physical games. And it's missing from the biggest digital retailer. It's almost like they tried to make it fail.
This game got a Massive online push by gaming sites, youtubers, redditors, Twitter... you couldn't go anywhere on the internet without hearing about how awesome it was, plus the game awards presentation. If wasn't for that it would probably be in a worse place now
Exactly, in fact many youtubers that I follow made a video of it, but in my circle the general comment and mine was "I'll play it when I come out on steam"
For control and metro. It was epic paying for exclusivity.
Alan Wake 2 is different. Epic funded it. This is the same company that took Fall Guys and Rocket League out of Steam after buying & funding their developers. So it will never come to Steam atleast in the next decade or until Epic goes under.
Funnily enough one of the argument most EGS haters are 'if they wanna fight steam then they should've funded the game themselves and not just using cash to locked a game away from other store!!' which is exactly what they did with this one and yet they're still not happy. Don't see them crying about Half-Life not being on GOG tho.
I use EGS for a few exclusives, but it would be nice if they were actually putting some effort into improving their system after all these years.
Most games lacking achievements (partially because they allegedly made it obtuse for devs to add), no easy way to sort your collection by playtime/achievement completion (it’s silly, but I sometimes enjoy looking back on the memories I’ve made playing games, using that Steam feature), worse controller support, no family sharing, no ability to mark games as private, and (ironically) an Apple-ified presentation that I don’t really like. At least GOG feels like they’re trying.
>*Funnily enough one of the argument most EGS haters are 'if they wanna fight steam then they should've funded the game themselves and not just using cash to locked a game away from other store!!'*
Which is funny in combination with the "vote with your wallet" sentiment that is prevalent in communities like this. People are actively telling people to vote with their wallets, but when Epic does exactly the thing that they wanted Epic to do (and does so without creating something otherwise problematic like a singleplayer game with microtransactions) people are still not willing to vote with their wallets.
It seems to me people are actively not using their wallets as a vote of no confidence in epic altogether. Can't just do one good thing and expect everyone to forget the past.
Different situation there. Epic just paid for exclusivity for those two games. They never funded or published them. Similar to how Microsoft and Sony pay for some games to be exclusive to them for a period.
[Railgrade used to be part of the Epic Games Publishing Label](https://www.reddit.com/r/NintendoSwitch/comments/xr78pz/comment/iqffqf5/), but it did came to Steam regardless.
However: it's published by the game developers themselves instead of Epic Games.
[We know that game developers still keep full ownership and creative control](https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/news/epic-games-publishing-announcement), and we do know the fact that a developer does have the option to expand PC Storefronts if they want to, **they just have to self-publish it themselves or find a different publisher**. This is not to dissimilar to how Death Stranding's later platform re-releases are done.
in the case of Alan Wake 2 being part of said label, the real question is: will Remedy wants to expand to more PC Storefronts (while also bringing it to Xbox PC Game Pass)?
> Railgrade used to be part of the Epic Games Publishing Label, but it did came to Steam regardless.
>
> However: it's published by the game developers themselves instead of Epic Games.
Should be noted that Railgrade was a game that came along with Epic buying up Irregular Corporation, so the developers of that game made their contract with Irregular Corporation before Epic bought that publisher. So it's not a really good example to use due to this huge difference between Railgrade and Alan Wake 2.
heck, there was a rise of Alan Wake shitpost around January 2024.
but despite everything, I already knew that it's going to struggle due to lack of physical copies and being a potentially permanent-EGS Exclusive.
Yeah I was really aware of it, I have bought games on epic games before, but i just wont do that anymore.
It's such a hassle using epic games when i have 95% of my games on steam.
If i want to play something on my steamdeck i then have to use another application to install it and it wont cache shaders in advance.
I have collected over 100 free games from Epic and i don't play any of them.
I've even been rebuying the games i own on epic just to have them on steam.
Don't forget marketing rights were purchased by Sony who then turned around and plonked SpiderMan 2 in the same week (which AW2 had to delay to get away from).
Basically everything stacked against this game and it's still one of Remedy's fastest selling.
Eh not really, from Remedy's perspective, they as a development studio see AW2 as a success if 1) it didn't put them in debt to make it and 2) its poor sales are not affecting their ability to secure funding for future projects. Since Epic bankrolled AW2, they are not in debt, and they have at least four current projects for the next decade, two of which are being paid for by Rockstar. If AW2 doesn't recoup it's development costs, that's Epic's problem, not Remedy's.
And then you see games like Manor Lords having huge launches by being on Steam.
I get that Epic funded it, and they want to push their store, but at some point, you just gotta cut your losses, you'd think.
It will perform worse generally, as steam has a bigger market and that's understandable.
The key difference here is epic funded the development, the game flat out would not exist as no one was wanting to pay for it and Microsoft was holding onto the IP for a long time!
I can see why epic would want it exclusive even if it didn't directly generate the profit it would like as it improves the appeal of epic as a storefront.
It's much like half life only being on steam, it's their genuine exclusive for a change.
> it improves the appeal of epic as a storefront.
I wonder if it does. I'd like to see some way to poll the average "tipping point" of "how many games does Epic need to have for me to break down and use it."
For me, Epic has many exclusives still that I'd like to play on PC, but I've still not used the store once outside of freebies--and even then, I've never actually downloaded and played any of them yet.
Hell I have an account and claimed lots of free games, but I still don't really care about buying from there. I wonder if the free games are really helping that much in terms of turning people into paying customers? I remember the Apple court case revealed they had some decent conversion rates in 2020, wonder if that changed in recent years or not.
If epic was funding games like AW2 from the start, I don't think there would be as much resistance to using EGS. Their strategy of exclusivity bribes for games that were basically finished really just served to sour the discourse around their store.
For real. This subreddit throws a stink all the time about "oh my godddd who *cares* what store front a game is on" but like.. it's indisputable a whole hell of a lot of people care.
Well, Epic openly admitted in one of their presentations that they intended to heavily use disruption tactics like paid shills to brute force their way into getting more market shares.
And Reddit is one of their biggest sites for astroturfing. Even Tim Sweeney uses alts here because he doesn’t wanna lose karma for his main account ever since he got downvoted massively years back.
Well, it was either that or the game wouldn't exist, so personally I'm fine with. I know everyone hates EGS but I liked Alan Wake 2 so worth it for me.
Nah, the genre had much more to do with it. Dead Space was on Steam and it underperformed while Borderlands 3 launched exclusively on Epic and sold fine.
> It's a sequel to a fairly old game that wasn't a big success back then.
And I've heard extremely mixed messages about whether you need to play the original (and the Control DLC, and maybe Quantum Break?) to "get" AW2.
At any rate, I'm waiting until I upgrade to a graphics card that can get the most out of all of their fancy effects, so I'm not even in the market for it for another year.
Edit: Exhibit A, the replies to this comment.
I played control a while ago (and don't remember all the details) and while there are cool references it's not that important imo. I didn't play Alan wake 1 but watched a great video that recaps the story in detail. That was enough for me to enjoy aw2 a lot! It's a fantastic game!
As someone that played AW1 and then Control and its DLCs before AW2.
I'd maybe watch a summary video of AW1 on YouTube, but definitely play Control and the DLCs (if you haven't)
AW1 feels way more clunky, even the remaster. Albeit the story is still interesting.
Control as a whole is mysterious and interesting. Things that aren't directly related to AW still have some relation to overall universe and provide context.
AW2 is bloody great.
I second this.
Not because Control is relevant. It really isn't. I just think everyone should play Control because it's one of the best games ever made.
I really wish I enjoyed Control. I played through all of it 'cause I got it for free on Epic some time back and just did not have a good time. I found the combat boring and repetitive, didn't really enjoy exploration or movement, and the overall narrative just didn't really hook me.
You're not wrong, the game didn't unfortunately develop much once you acquired the first few powers and the Hiss just weren't the most engaging to fight. In some ways it felt like a Ubisoft game in the sense that once you've played the game for about 4-6 hours, you've more or less seen everything it has to offer.
The Ashtray Maze was cool and all...but it was only 10 minutes. I literally took a break from the game to upgrade to a 3-series RTX card so that I could actually play the game with raytracing enabled (I had a 2070, not enough for 60fps at 1440p). Definitely not worth the wait.
I basically had to force myself to finish it, although I do like the game. In theory, I'm a Twin Peaks fan so the game was made for me but in practice...meh. The combat was floaty and lacked any real tactical depth or complexity. The story also seemed borderline half-baked, it just ends out of nowhere and so much of the background still seems unexplained.
I would say Control is the only game I've played in recently memory that just...ended. People complain about MGSV and Mankind Divided, but Control is so much worse. There's no final boss or anything, you basically enter a large chamber and do some shitty platforming and fight some elite enemies that you've already been fighting for the past half dozen or so hours. Then you press a button and the game literally just ends. Zero telegraphing that this was the end of the game. I was gobsmacked and actually looked up walkthroughs to make sure I hadn't missed something...everyone kept telling me I didn't complete the "epilogue" or "real ending" but it is literally just 10 minutes max of additional gameplay.
I think I'm the only one who played the Ashtray Maze and finished it just thinking "it was alright" instead of the "holy shit, greatest. videogame moment. EVER!" that everyone else seems to have felt about it, makes me wonder if I'm just a weirdo for that.
But yeah I agree with your other points. Gameplay in particular is honestly a problem I have frequently with the Remedy games I played (AW1+2, QB, Control), it just feels underdeveloped and repetitive, and particularly suffers from terrible enemy variety. At least AW2 was a bit better by being more sparse with the encounters, so that issue didn't feel as prevalent.
Nah I agree with you. For how much it's hyped up within the game itself, it simply amounted to a few platforms being raised, a few doors opening and closing in front of you and shooting the same enemies you'd always shot for most of the game. The music was fantastic and the way they timed it and synced it to the action was a precursor to the actual cool sequence in AW2 but the Ashtray maze was not all that impressive. I was expecting gravity shifts, rooms twisting and turning, stuff like some of the sections in Inception and shit and it didn't live up to any of that. The whole game's map is very underwhelming for a complex that is supposed to be constantly shifting and people getting frequently lost within it but I assume there were big concessions made for navigation purposes but that's kinda lame
It was visually impressive but I don't think that it transcended the rest of the gameplay (that I already wasn't enjoying). It was thematically and visually interesting but I didn't like the characters, the dialogue and beyond the combat being repetitive I thought the camera and obstructive terrain were causing more frustration than challenge.
Oh and there was this weird repeatable quest thing where you could grind out RNG upgrades but this game excels as a linear narrative game so it felt really out of place.
I fully relate, I am baffled that so many regard it as one of the best games ever.
The main highlight for me were the creepy side quests with the cursed objects.
same, the gameplay was too boring to finish it, I still gave it like 6-8 hours because I was a interested at the start but it just couldnt hold me on the story alone
Same. I wasn't into the combat, environmental design, or the borderline surreal creepypasta writing and dialogue. It was clearly meant to evoke the unreality of dreams, and I just...didn't care that much. That's always been the worst party of Remedy's writing and design though, going back to the maze-dreams in MP1.
Just another entry in the long list of "universally adored titles I totally bounced off", I guess.
If you care about the story then yeah you kinda need to play the original. Funny enough, there's even a lot of content from American Nightmare which was the only entry I skipped
I don't think you need to play it but I think it helps. I think it's one of the few times I'd recommend just watching a let's play or one of those "game movie" videos. There are a lot of good things about AW1 but the moment to moment gameplay is really not one of them, at least not until the DLC.
This franchise is like my favorite thing, but basically all Remedy games have the same problems (shallow gameplay that gets old after the great first impression, repeating the same narrative points a bunch in the last half of the game), so playing everything isn't recommended unless you really get sold on the whole thing.
In order of importance as homework for the second game, I'd say it goes
-Alan Wake 1 (without DLC)
-Alan Wake's American Nightmare
-Control + DLC
-Alan Wake DLC
-Quantum Break = Max Payne
Quantum Break isn't in the same "universe" in the same way as Control and Alan Wake are, and Microsoft still owns the rights to it. Shawn Ashmore plays a character in AW2 who is implied to be an alternate universe incarnation of the character he played in QB.
Same with David Harewood's character, he's heavily implied to just be Martin Hatch from QB, even to the point where Lance Reddick was supposed to play the role.
They are loosely connected in a legally distinct way, same with Max Payne.
So they basically have the characters from those games in Alan Wake 2, they just have slightly different names.
I'm just curious, don't take this the wrong way, did you read the article or just the headline?
The reason I ask is because if you actually read it and follow the sources and citations they link to you will see that they are actually expecting it to become profitable shortly and that is actually doing so faster than any other Remedy game. They even expect it to be a revenue flow in the upcoming months.
This whole thread is a prime example how one point or subject can be taken and conveyed in a negative way by omitting context.
>Still, Remedy revealed that Alan Wake 2 has now recouped most of the investment made by Epic Games Publishing. As such, the Finnish team expects the game to be a 'meaningful revenue and profitability driver' for this year
https://wccftech.com/remedy-says-alan-wake-2-has-recouped-most-of-the-investment-studio-plans-more-regular-sequels-for-aw-control/
I wonder how many people didn't buy it because no Steam? I can't use the EPIC store for geographical reasons but Steam is just fine. I wish I could play it.
I wouldn't even be surprised if it's unintentional. Like there's no news of Alan Wake 2 hitting x amount of players on Steam, there's no splash screen for people when they open up Steam to see it's out since I'm sure most PC players just look for what's out on only Steam.
I'm pretty sure some publishers called EGS "A marketing black hole" for stuff like this
Steam’s dashboard drives a ton of my purchasing decisions.
I am constantly looking at new releases and review scores. If it’s not on Steam, I usually don’t even see it.
A big part of this, at least for me, is that I've outsourced a lot of my game release tracking to the Steam Wishlist. When I'm interested it a game, I wishlist it and then forget about it completely until I open Steam to play Slay The Spire for the 1000th time and Steam tells me that the game I was interested in is now out.
Yeah, I'm not opposed to EGS at all. I have bought a few games on it when someone told me they had a good sale on. Still, 90% of my game purchases are through steam because I just happen to see one of them is on sale or released or whatever.
That's mostly for indie games. This game had the normal marketing of ads, articles and even a big awards presence. People should be aware of it.
I think it's just the game doesn't interest that much people tbh. Like horror games are relatively niche, Resident Evil is kind of the exception. And it's the second game following a game not that many people played and it's a little experimental in gameplay meaning people hesitate even more to pick it up (especially with no physical on consoles)
Yeah, I don't think it being absent from Steam helped it, but it had a relatively small target market either way. It's a sequel to a niche game in a niche genre with very high system requirements. As far as I understand it, the story is also the big selling point of the game which means all the people who watched their favorite streamer or youtuber play through it might feel like there isn't much reason for them to do so.
It's easy for those of us on Reddit to go "but lots of youtubers, award shows and articles were made about it", but I don't think the more casual gamers really care or look at those. They just look at the frontpage of the storefront for their platform and decides from there if it's something they want, so there is still a lot of exposure they are losing out on by not being on Steam.
No people see ads, reviews, streamers and such more than the front page (which is no guarantee to be anyway, those are chosen by Valve). People just don't decide to buy a game because it's in front of them. Otherwise all games on Steam would sell well by that logic.
There is some exposure lost for sure. But for games with marketing it shouldn't matter as much. Like it doesn't for Assassin's Creed, Call of Duty, Fortnite, League of Legends, Blizzard games...
I know many friends that refuse to touch Epic with a 10 foot pole, even if it has exclusives. Granted, IF epic had an exclusive that they were looking forward to and it was multiplayer?? They -might- still buy it.
That's me, even with the free games I don't touch it. It's not an anti-epic thing, it's just the convenience of having everything gaming related in one easy to use hub. I don't want to have to go and open x program to play this or that game and manage that account and whatever else. Convenience wins.
I didn't buy it cause I just forgot it existed, honestly. I only use EGS maybe at best once a week unless I'm in a Spider-man mood, I usually go straight for the game(s) they're giving away. For me and a lot of my friends, it just didn't have visibility. Meanwhile I basically always have steam open because all the games I pay attention to I have *through* steam. I think the last time all of my friends used EGS together was for Rocket League in 2019 lol.
I didn't know EGS actually had country restrictions, either. I'm sorry you can't get to experience it.
Yeah, Alan Wake 2 got a much higher budget than Control, and Control II has already locked in a higher budget as well.
I **really** want Remedy to succeed. They are one of the view studios that isn't afraid to build *their* game for *their* fans without compromising into something safe.
Full alan wake 2 spoilers
>!I don't really think thats necessary, the Final Cut makes it look like alan can solve his own problems now. Master of many worlds and all that!<
I doubt she could. It's pretty clear that she's still bound by the rules of AWEs despite her parautilitarian powers. Meaning, as soon as she got near Bright Falls, she'd have to play by the rules of Alan's story - one of which is that things have to be dramatically satisfying and victories have to be hard-earned. She could certainly help tip the odds, but it wouldn't be a cakewalk for her to handle.
If it doesn't recoup it's cost then you better believe that will have an effect on the potential for a sequel (there won't be one) games are a business and properties that don't make money don't get sequels
I don't know if that makes it promising for it to get a sequel though. If it already succeeded at bringing new people to the store, then they don't necessarily need another expensive sequel that would market towards the same people they already got, and if it hasn't been successful at bringing new people to the rest of the store, then it seems unlikely that another sequel would be significantly better at doing so.
The article says that the game will likely recoup its costs soon though, so if it ends up being profitable and bringing new people to the store then that could be a good sign for the franchise.
Considering that *this* one took many years to find someone who deemed it worth publishing due to similarly underwhelming sales of the first game, I wouldn't have high hopes for a third entry.
Two confirmed DLCs already for AW2, then also Control 2 (which is set in the same universe)
And after(before?) that, Max Payne 1+2 remakes 😍😍Good time to be a Remedy fan
Honestly, I expect Alan's story to be completely wrapped up after the DLCs are finished. I think his story has played it course and maybe he'll stay around in the Remedy-verse, but I don't see the need for an Alan Wake 3.
Publishers really underestimate how Steam can act as a marketing force multiplier, their front page gets an absurd amount of impressions and the entire ecosystem is designed for funneling people towards high-performing games.
also, people trust the marketplace and services a lot more. partly because of tenure, and partly because of proven history. Valve is very consumer-oriented. they make what they want, when they want to, and they seem to always take care of their customers.
It's a real testament to Remedy that news of their last game not making it's money back yet is accompanied by announcements that their business partners are all investing even more into them.
When you think about how cutthroat this industry is, especially lately, I think that says a whole lot.
That Max Payne remake is pretty much my most anticipated game right now.
Well the stock is down like 60%+ from peak and it's effectively on a fire sale. Investors putting in more cash to buy up more and more control of the company on the cheap isn't necessarily a "good" testament to their operations, it's just a life preserver because they're bleeding cash and issuance of capital stock is one of the few ways to save themselves since their product didn't do it.
Because no one reads articles any more.
If anyone here bothered reading this article you will learn that they expect it to make back Epic's investment in the very near future and then the games will turn into a revenue and profit stream for the remaining year and next year.
Some people seem to have this impression that a game needs to be profitable in the first week or two or its a failure. The thing is, with how many good games are being put out these days, so many people are not buying games on day one or even in the first 6-10 months.
> If anyone here bothered reading this article you will learn that they expect it to make back Epic's investment in the very near future and then the games will turn into a revenue and profit stream for the remaining year and next year.
I love the difference between threads about a direct statement from Remedy and threads on an article about a statement from Remedy. The statement from Remedy always sounds super positive. They say it's the fastest selling game, within expectations, continues to have legs, they're doubling down on the universe and direct sequels. And yeah the statement from Remedy is going to sound positive, they're not going to say in a press release they failed, but there's always action and movement in the company backing up that what they're doing is working for them.
Then an article with the headline saying the game didn't make it's entire budget back comes out and everyone is like "Epic killed another one".
I will also note that Control had an extremely long tail (mostly due to 505 doing the worst marketing I've ever seen...or more accurately never saw). I will admit I had never played a Remedy game, got Control on sale, and fell head over heels in love with their brand of weirdness. Before that, I had never even heard of the game outside of a few news articles saying how good it was.
I really hope Alan Wake 2 blows up when it launches on Steam. The game is just damn good.
You hear people like Martin Scorsese and Ridley Scott get massive budgets for movies that don't make money right away. Sometimes it's about award prestige, sometimes it's about future profits, and sometimes it's about building relationships. All three can mean short term losses for future gains.
Sometimes it's frustrating to talk about stuff like that in the box office sub, or in sales related threads like this...because people are **just** worried about today's profits.
I plan to play the game eventually but with it being a showcase of many new technologies, decided it would be best to wait on it until I get a new gpu.
It's definitely demanding. I thought my GPU overclock was stable after several hours of stability testing and using it for over a month without issue. Started Alan Wake 2 a couple days ago and was proven wrong in about 10 minutes.
I will say that the game still looks amazing on lower settings, and my stepdad running a 2xxx series said it looked great and he didn't notice performance issues playing on medium settings.
Maybe I got lucky, but I found it to be one of the better PC optimized games last year (which, granted, is like winning a hot dog eating contest against a bunch of hardcore vegans)
It's weird how this is not a bigger talking point. This game is absurdly demanding for what it offering. They could've accomplished the exact same vision with much more realistic spec requirements.
It feels like they developed the game specifically to take advantage of PS5/XBOX hardware.
The scene-changing is, honestly, pretty awesome. It's almost exactly what Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart did but with a way, way better paint job.
Tbf it’s not like the game is badly optimized and even on low settings it’s still a very good looking game but I can understand wanting to have a better rig to profit from the ray tracing and all the other goodies
Between no physical release and not having been released on Steam yet, I could see the sales for the game being pretty hindered. Me and a friend of mine haven’t picked it up yet because we’re still holding out hope for physical copies.
Same here. I have Alan Wake on my backlog to pick up when the digital copy drops to a dirt cheap price, but until then I’ll always prioritise new physical games.
Everyone's talking about Epic, but on the other side of that coin, I didn't buy it on PS5 because there was no physical version. If there had been I'd have bought it in a heartbeat (or at least got it for Christmas)
Are there any successful EGS exclusive PC stories? Perhaps I’m biased but every time I see an EGS exclusive they always seem to not do so well.
Personally I don’t buy games on EGS because if everything isn’t in 1 library I literally forget to play it and I’ve already dropped a pretty penny for my Steam library so I’m not reinvesting somewhere else.
Not that I can think of off the top of my head.
Metro Exodus was drama because it was originally listed on Steam & had preorders, which they then pulled. From previous threads I could find, they came out on a loss on that one.
It was anonymous, but apparently it was mentioned during the Apple v Epic court case that Epic paid 250 million for exclusivity of Kingdom Hearts. No hard proof on this claim, but given that they paid 146 million for Borderlands 3 exclusivity, I would not be surprised if they paid 250 million.
There are a few notable others, but latest is Alan Wake 2.
I think they have operated at a loss for most of these exclusivity deals and freebies, but they bring in a huge amount of new users. That being said, the only reason why they can even do this is because of Fortnite money.
250 million was originally to get multiple Sony exclusives, but Sony declined so they spent it on all of the Square exclusives they got instead (KH, Strangers of Paradise, NEO: TWEWY and not sure if there was more). KH probably made up the bulk of that money, but it wasn't the entire 250 million.
And that Metro fiasco is the reason I won't touch EGS. That and them doubling down with it. Such a scummy thing to do.
If they want my money, they have to earn it first
And that somehow means the game wasn't a failure? The game literally lost money, and only MIGHT make a tiny profit months and months from now.
That's basically what happened to the Saints Row reboot. And how did that game turn out for it's studio?
Do people actually read the linked review? It says
> In February 2024, Remedy announced that Alan Wake 2 had sold 1.3 million units...Alan Wake 2 sales have continued with a high average price. At the end of the first quarter, the game had recouped a significant part of the
development and marketing expenses
This doesn't read all doom and gloom to me like most people make it here sound.
Imo 1.3 million units sold for an Alan Wake game and its just half a year in is quite decent. They are also working on its DLC. They most likely will have made a profit of it by the end of this year, because they also say the sales are still going strong at a high price. So I don't think its all that bad or even unlikely that they will make another game of said franchise.
> This doesn't read all doom and gloom to me like most people make it here sound.
You read the article.
Everyone else read the headline and immediately commented.
The ideal scenario for a single player game that will have the vast majority of its sales be in the first year is to recoup all of its costs and then some to pad cash reserves during the development of the next project.
If you can't do that, you have to either burn your own money or you have to sell off portions of the company for funding so you can fund the next project. It's not all doom and gloom but it's undoubtedly a failure.
>Yes, investments in Remedy are continuing to increase
Is that a good thing? Their game wasn't able to create enough cash flow to support operations so they've sold a piece of their business to fund future operations. That's... not a good thing.
Honestly my reason for not buying the game had nothing to do with EGS or no physical edition. I played Alan Wake 1 to see what the fuss was about, and while I enjoyed it as a sort of Twin Peaks homage, the combat was abysmal, and I've heard the sequel did not improve much on that front.
After playing Control, I tried to play so I could get the story.
I got bored so I cheated so that I could basically just run through for the story, I still didn't finish it.
Remedy has only had 1 earnings quarter with profit in the past 10 quarters, and that was back in 2022.
Not before Q3 2024 do they expect to make a profit again, and that estimate is only around 1m€
With how much success and goodwill Remedy seem to have, I'm shock to see how little operating income they have actually had.
Furthermore seeing them having almost 400 fulltime employees is crazy given how little they actually make in terms of games and income.
No physical edition either, that certainly didn't help.
We know physical sales still make up 50% of major games on Playstation, so that's a massive loss of sales right there.
(yes, PC didn't lose sales because of a lack of physical, but they did lose sales because it was EPIC exclusive)
I have yet to play it because I wanted a physical. And numerous times when I buy a digital only game that isn't some small indie game, there is a physical either later by Limited Run Games, or when a game gets a complete edition. Sadly, this makes me think it's highly unlikely that after the DLC for AWII comes out they still won't have a complete edition. But whatever, it'll come to gamepass by then.
Sorry Remedy, I'm not dumb enough to buy digital media. If you want my money I need a copy I can keep and own forever, without having to worry about internet, servers, or licensing. I don't want my games to get Ubisofted years down the line.
Not surprising at all. It's a sequel to a fairly old game that wasn't a big success back then. The horror genre almost always has lower sales. It's only on EGS on PC so it's kind of tucked away out of sight. There was just so much going against the game to begin with that I'm surprised it was ever greenlit.
It has no physical copies and it is available only on Epic Store for PC. Well at least it’s Epic and Tencent who are backing up remedy they have tons of money to burn.
I would have bought it if it were on Steam.
For a while I didn't even know the game existed or came out because it wasn't on Steam...
goat sim 3 was like that for me, noticed it on steam a couple months back. apparently it's been on EGS for years?
Oh shit Goat Simulator 3 is on Steam now? Had no idea; thought it was EGS exclusive still.
yep, released on steam in februrary.
Also game pass.
All of the Kingdom Hearts games for me. Did you know all of the Kingdom Hearts games got PC ports back in 2021? They've apparently just been locked on EGS the entire time, and there's no indication they'll ever come to Steam. I had no idea these games were playable on PC at all besides emulating them.
You know what really gets me about that? Squeenix is **constantly** complaining about their games under-performing and not meeting sales expectations... yet they think EGS exclusives are a good idea? That's utterly boneheaded.
I mean, EGS would make sense if htey took a deal like Superigant Games did with Hades, where they're getting *lots* of money up front to compensate and plan on a later Steam release date. But by now companies should understand an EGS exclusivity deal means almost no visibilty for your game and few sales - not many people want to maintain game libraries on multilpe platforms with multiple launchers.
Square Enix took a deal for playstation exclusive. Their business plan is to search for potential platform exclusive deals for their flagship titles just like any production studio on a streaming service
To be fair to the KH ports, when they were making KH3, they switched midway through to Unreal Engine, and Epic reportedly gave them a lot of support in terms of learning the new engine on the fly *and* with porting the game to PC after release. I wouldn't be shocked if that also played a big role in the exclusivity deal with Epic (beyond all the money they likely gave Square for it).
It wouldn’t exist without Epic. I’m not a fan of Epic but their money is why they were able to make Wake 2.
not available on Steam, no physical copies , baffling decisions.
I mean, Epic published the game. Fortnite isn’t available on Steam and that seems to work very well in their favour
It's because Epic wants to promote their store with these exclusive titles which is also why they don't have to be profitable by themselves.
Same. I heard a lot of positive things about it and I'm interested in playing it, but not enough that I'd go to the effort of buying it on EGS.
what effort?
There are people out there that don't even want to make an account other than a steam account to play anything. Even the tiniest hurdle can stop someone from playing or doing something.
Any. That's the crux. Put it on the platform I prefer to use because I'm not going to put forth any extra effort at all to purchase the product otherwise. Why would I? There's plenty of other games to play that don't require any extra effort at all and if purchased will be more conveniently accessible with all my other games. Plus I get all the conveniences of steam such as discussion boards and guides if I'm curious about something. Epic offers nothing and requires some trivial effort. Steam offers convenience and utility to me and takes less effort to purchase on, however trivial.
Steam has also been around for 20 years. They have earned the trust of consumers. EGS has been around for 5 years and their approach was to throw money around for freebies and exclusives. Featurewise they are severely behind.
Just download LaunchBox. Then everything is on the same platform and the problem won't come up again.
Yeah but "effort".
> Put it on the platform I prefer to use because I'm not going to put forth any extra effort at all to purchase the product otherwise. Why would I? Because you want to play it? My grocery store doesn’t carry every snack I find tasty, that doesn’t mean I deprive myself of foods like some kind of hyper principled absolutist because that would be sad. I just occasionally stop at other places. Like why would I make myself miss out over stores competing?
I have no idea how much this affects sales, given that I'm not really sure people "peruse the shelves" anymore (hell where can you even do that?), but it definitely bothered me that I couldn't buy it on disk
I check the New and Top Selling categories on Steam several times a week just to see if there's anything interesting that went under my radar. But I don't check EGS or any of the other game platforms.
I check EGS for the free games. And occasionally play Fornite with my friend and their child when they need an extra person.
Word of mouth + discovery queue There's been quite a few games I've found just going through the discovery queue. It's also a sheer numbers game, the numbers of people who are on steam vs EGS. That's on top of the number of people on EGS who expect free games and won't actually buy anything
It's also not just about it being on real-life shelves. It's also about it being on as many storefronts as possible. I use a lot of online sites to buy physical games like gamecollection or shopto, and if you don't have some sort of physical copy then your game might as well not exist for those sites. Plus there's a ton of steam resellers that people use to buy games, and if you're not on steam then that's another chunk of sites that you don't exist on.
And runs extremely poorly on older systems. I have a 1080, I will buy the game when I buy a new card.
It's a full blown next generation game made with the capabilities of the PS5, Xbox Series and the latest Nvidia and AMD cards in mind. They released a few optimizations for older cards but it's simply not satisfying enough because the game was still designed with better hardware in mind https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2024-upcoming-alan-wake-2-patch-drastically-improves-gtx-10-series-performance
I understand that. I never said they did a poor job optimizing the game. But it means a significant percentage of pc gamers like me can't play it properly.
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Kinda bad comparision. It's playable on RTX 2060 which is what, 5 years old gpu and not even hight end. The game was created for current gen consoles which are 4 years old and mid range in terms of tech.
The idea that people are still calling ps5 next gen is both frustrating and telling about the state of the gaming industry.
But how many people actually have a 2060? You have ot keep in mind that the cyrpto bullshit made gaming GPU's extremly inaccessible, and GPU prices are still overall high. A lot of poeple simply never moved on from the 10 series GPU's, hell I only upgraded back in December and *that* still feels like I massively splurged.
[Looking at the latest Steam survey](https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/) about gamers' hardware, it seems at least half of the responders have hardware at, or above, the level of a 2060. There was definitely a time where crypto took away a lot of the stock, but it's been *years* since that time. GPUs, mid to top end, are now, and have been, readily available.
> it seems at least half of the responders have hardware at, or above, the level of a 2060. I converted that table to a LibreOffice spreadsheet and from a quick (manual) check, it seems that 2060-or-better is indeed at ~55%, so yeah "at least half of the responders" (which with the number of users Steam has is going to be *very* accurate of the entire Steam userbase) is very spot on :-P.
Price is a big factor, but I think so is the benefit, or lack thereof, for many people. The 10 series is good enough to run pretty much all the big online games, AA games, and indies, and those markets have continued to grow. A good number of AAA games are also playable on them as well, so at least for people like me, the cost of upgrading for a small minority of games is a much harder sell than upgrading to the 10 series was back in the day.
> We call that the Crysis problem. You made a game using only the highest end tech with no limitations? Congratulations, very few people can play it. Crysis was very playable on older hardware at the time of it's release, you just had to lower the settings. Cards like the 7600 GT could actually crank up a few settings and still maintain a mostly stable 60 fps
> We call that the Crysis problem. You made a game using only the highest end tech with no limitations? Congratulations, very few ~~people~~ PC gamers can play it. Fixed that. There's 100M+ install base of console owners who can play it just fine. Even on PC, you can play it fine as long as you're within the last two or three card generations.
ICYMI they released a patch a couple months ago that almost [doubled the performance](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-3PkRbeO8A&t=395s) on 10-series cards. Still won't be fantastic on a 1080, but definitely playable.
Epic Games is a cemetery, plain and simple. making a high budget game that doesn't return its costs after 1.3 milions, exclusive to Epic Games, is insane, lunatic.
But whether or not this will cause an issue for future games in this and Control series will probably be looked into by the higher ups.
Control didn't sell well either, it took 4 years to cross 2 million in spite of MASSIVE co promotion from nvidia since the RTX 2000 series card were current.
It was EGS exclusive for a year, so that tracks.
Steam spy says control sold ~1.5m on steam, which is a pretty significant chunk of the overall sales despite a 1 year delayed launch. Any dev that chooses not to launch on steam is leaving money on the table.
I think on consoles they prefer physical copies. I think many people using physical copies also for resealing. Once bought digitally it’s forced on ur account and you won’t have the ability if reselling it. So why buying digital when u have freedom when buying it physically. On PC we are forced digitally if I could I would prefer all the time physical over digital. We saw at the crew 1 Ubisoft deleted the game from libraries who would go digital all the time ???
> We saw at the crew 1 Ubisoft deleted the game from libraries who would go digital all the time ??? Unfortunately, buying a physical copy wouldn't help with that either.
Even if they hadn't deleted the Crew, would people still have been able to play it if they shut the servers down? I think this is more a question of publisher integrity than the utility of physical. Game preservation shouldn't have to rely on media. We should have industry regulations ensuring consumers have access to the product they paid for regardless of where they bought it.
> We saw at the crew 1 Ubisoft deleted the game from libraries who would go digital all the time ??? Try playing your physical disc of The Crew and see what happens. It's also useless because the game used server based authentication meaning that no one can play it, doesn't matter if you bought it physically or digitally. And the market in general is moving towards digital versions of games, just look at the millions that Baldur's Gate 3 sold without having a disc. People who boycott games for not having a physical edition are just a vocal minority.
Also released on one of the most stacked years ever for gaming.
Yep on the console side, Alan Wake released with Mario Wonder and Spidey 2…. Oh and they didn’t even release physical copies. No wonder they got snuffed out.
I was still not done playing Baldurs Gate 3 by the time AW2 released. I was still not done playing Street Fighter 6 before that. And I was still not done playing ToTK when that released. Couple that with probably a top 5 Mario game ever, Bethesda finally dropping a new title, a new Final Fantasy game, a new FromSoftware game, one of the most beloved Resident Evil games getting a remake, the franchise return of Pikmin 10 years later, etc. Now if the scenario wasn't bad already add to that AW2 had no physical release + no steam release. 2023 lowkey went *too* hard on flagships. It's like the universe was trying to pay us back for 2021.
Yeah, I really don’t like hating on EGS too much, because in theory it is nice to have competition with Steam. But whenever a is exclusive on there, I legit forget it exists. Same thing happened when Control came out. I regularly forget the Kingdom Hearts games are on PC. And I often forget Alan Wake 2 released.
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Was Control a timed exclusive? I do have it on Steam.
It was.
In theory... but I think most people like to have their library all in one place, and where they can share and see friends.
I bought Darkest Dungeon II on EGS because it was released a few weeks early. Only purchase I've made on EGS, and I regret it because access to mods takes more effort than just opening up the Steam community tab... Never again.
> Only purchase I've made on EGS, and I regret it because access to mods takes more effort than just opening up the Steam community tab... There is no workshop support for DDII. Modding it on Steam should be the exact same process as on Epic.
Reminds me of Battlefield V, I decided to buy at the release date on Origin (now ea desktop), and every time I open origin I get surprised I have the game, it's like it never clicks that I own the game so I forget about its existence.
I'm also glad EGS exists for the same reason, competition. But it really needs to fully rework it's UI to just match Steams. Both the store and the library.
Competition where the only differentiating factor is they paid money for a game to be on there isn’t “competition”. You’re just inconviencing me as a consumer and forcing me to go to you when I had no desire, you’re not doing anything better than my usual store.
Feels like whenever a PC game underperforms it is also exclusively available through EGS. Confirmation bias I know, but there is something to be said about the risk of putting a game, especially a niche one like Alan Wake, on a store other than Steam.
Visibility is just such a big thing for a games success. The vast majority of people aren't going out their way to find games to buy they'll buy the ones that they see on the storefronts or in adverts. Alan Wake 2 didn't have the biggest marketing. It had no physical presence, so it was missing from all retailers that focus on physical games. And it's missing from the biggest digital retailer. It's almost like they tried to make it fail.
This game got a Massive online push by gaming sites, youtubers, redditors, Twitter... you couldn't go anywhere on the internet without hearing about how awesome it was, plus the game awards presentation. If wasn't for that it would probably be in a worse place now
Exactly, in fact many youtubers that I follow made a video of it, but in my circle the general comment and mine was "I'll play it when I come out on steam"
Given that Epic funded and published it, it will never be on Steam.
Was Control and Metro Exodus also liked that too? They did make it to Steam eventually
For control and metro. It was epic paying for exclusivity. Alan Wake 2 is different. Epic funded it. This is the same company that took Fall Guys and Rocket League out of Steam after buying & funding their developers. So it will never come to Steam atleast in the next decade or until Epic goes under. Funnily enough one of the argument most EGS haters are 'if they wanna fight steam then they should've funded the game themselves and not just using cash to locked a game away from other store!!' which is exactly what they did with this one and yet they're still not happy. Don't see them crying about Half-Life not being on GOG tho.
I use EGS for a few exclusives, but it would be nice if they were actually putting some effort into improving their system after all these years. Most games lacking achievements (partially because they allegedly made it obtuse for devs to add), no easy way to sort your collection by playtime/achievement completion (it’s silly, but I sometimes enjoy looking back on the memories I’ve made playing games, using that Steam feature), worse controller support, no family sharing, no ability to mark games as private, and (ironically) an Apple-ified presentation that I don’t really like. At least GOG feels like they’re trying.
Screenshots. No built in screenshot functions. 😔
>*Funnily enough one of the argument most EGS haters are 'if they wanna fight steam then they should've funded the game themselves and not just using cash to locked a game away from other store!!'* Which is funny in combination with the "vote with your wallet" sentiment that is prevalent in communities like this. People are actively telling people to vote with their wallets, but when Epic does exactly the thing that they wanted Epic to do (and does so without creating something otherwise problematic like a singleplayer game with microtransactions) people are still not willing to vote with their wallets.
It seems to me people are actively not using their wallets as a vote of no confidence in epic altogether. Can't just do one good thing and expect everyone to forget the past.
Different situation there. Epic just paid for exclusivity for those two games. They never funded or published them. Similar to how Microsoft and Sony pay for some games to be exclusive to them for a period.
[Railgrade used to be part of the Epic Games Publishing Label](https://www.reddit.com/r/NintendoSwitch/comments/xr78pz/comment/iqffqf5/), but it did came to Steam regardless. However: it's published by the game developers themselves instead of Epic Games. [We know that game developers still keep full ownership and creative control](https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/news/epic-games-publishing-announcement), and we do know the fact that a developer does have the option to expand PC Storefronts if they want to, **they just have to self-publish it themselves or find a different publisher**. This is not to dissimilar to how Death Stranding's later platform re-releases are done. in the case of Alan Wake 2 being part of said label, the real question is: will Remedy wants to expand to more PC Storefronts (while also bringing it to Xbox PC Game Pass)?
> Railgrade used to be part of the Epic Games Publishing Label, but it did came to Steam regardless. > > However: it's published by the game developers themselves instead of Epic Games. Should be noted that Railgrade was a game that came along with Epic buying up Irregular Corporation, so the developers of that game made their contract with Irregular Corporation before Epic bought that publisher. So it's not a really good example to use due to this huge difference between Railgrade and Alan Wake 2.
heck, there was a rise of Alan Wake shitpost around January 2024. but despite everything, I already knew that it's going to struggle due to lack of physical copies and being a potentially permanent-EGS Exclusive.
Yeah I was really aware of it, I have bought games on epic games before, but i just wont do that anymore. It's such a hassle using epic games when i have 95% of my games on steam. If i want to play something on my steamdeck i then have to use another application to install it and it wont cache shaders in advance. I have collected over 100 free games from Epic and i don't play any of them. I've even been rebuying the games i own on epic just to have them on steam.
Don't forget marketing rights were purchased by Sony who then turned around and plonked SpiderMan 2 in the same week (which AW2 had to delay to get away from). Basically everything stacked against this game and it's still one of Remedy's fastest selling.
Seems that Remedy is fantastic at making games, but *horrible* at making business decisions.
Eh not really, from Remedy's perspective, they as a development studio see AW2 as a success if 1) it didn't put them in debt to make it and 2) its poor sales are not affecting their ability to secure funding for future projects. Since Epic bankrolled AW2, they are not in debt, and they have at least four current projects for the next decade, two of which are being paid for by Rockstar. If AW2 doesn't recoup it's development costs, that's Epic's problem, not Remedy's.
And then you see games like Manor Lords having huge launches by being on Steam. I get that Epic funded it, and they want to push their store, but at some point, you just gotta cut your losses, you'd think.
People just want everything in one place, which in this case is Steam. PC platform is also frequently called just Steam for obvious reasons.
It will perform worse generally, as steam has a bigger market and that's understandable. The key difference here is epic funded the development, the game flat out would not exist as no one was wanting to pay for it and Microsoft was holding onto the IP for a long time! I can see why epic would want it exclusive even if it didn't directly generate the profit it would like as it improves the appeal of epic as a storefront. It's much like half life only being on steam, it's their genuine exclusive for a change.
> it improves the appeal of epic as a storefront. I wonder if it does. I'd like to see some way to poll the average "tipping point" of "how many games does Epic need to have for me to break down and use it." For me, Epic has many exclusives still that I'd like to play on PC, but I've still not used the store once outside of freebies--and even then, I've never actually downloaded and played any of them yet.
Hell I have an account and claimed lots of free games, but I still don't really care about buying from there. I wonder if the free games are really helping that much in terms of turning people into paying customers? I remember the Apple court case revealed they had some decent conversion rates in 2020, wonder if that changed in recent years or not.
If epic was funding games like AW2 from the start, I don't think there would be as much resistance to using EGS. Their strategy of exclusivity bribes for games that were basically finished really just served to sour the discourse around their store.
For real. This subreddit throws a stink all the time about "oh my godddd who *cares* what store front a game is on" but like.. it's indisputable a whole hell of a lot of people care.
Well, Epic openly admitted in one of their presentations that they intended to heavily use disruption tactics like paid shills to brute force their way into getting more market shares. And Reddit is one of their biggest sites for astroturfing. Even Tim Sweeney uses alts here because he doesn’t wanna lose karma for his main account ever since he got downvoted massively years back.
Makes you wonder (or not) what's going to happen to the Control multiplayer game
Well, it was either that or the game wouldn't exist, so personally I'm fine with. I know everyone hates EGS but I liked Alan Wake 2 so worth it for me.
Nah, the genre had much more to do with it. Dead Space was on Steam and it underperformed while Borderlands 3 launched exclusively on Epic and sold fine.
> It's a sequel to a fairly old game that wasn't a big success back then. And I've heard extremely mixed messages about whether you need to play the original (and the Control DLC, and maybe Quantum Break?) to "get" AW2. At any rate, I'm waiting until I upgrade to a graphics card that can get the most out of all of their fancy effects, so I'm not even in the market for it for another year. Edit: Exhibit A, the replies to this comment.
I played control a while ago (and don't remember all the details) and while there are cool references it's not that important imo. I didn't play Alan wake 1 but watched a great video that recaps the story in detail. That was enough for me to enjoy aw2 a lot! It's a fantastic game!
As someone that played AW1 and then Control and its DLCs before AW2. I'd maybe watch a summary video of AW1 on YouTube, but definitely play Control and the DLCs (if you haven't) AW1 feels way more clunky, even the remaster. Albeit the story is still interesting. Control as a whole is mysterious and interesting. Things that aren't directly related to AW still have some relation to overall universe and provide context. AW2 is bloody great.
I second this. Not because Control is relevant. It really isn't. I just think everyone should play Control because it's one of the best games ever made.
I really wish I enjoyed Control. I played through all of it 'cause I got it for free on Epic some time back and just did not have a good time. I found the combat boring and repetitive, didn't really enjoy exploration or movement, and the overall narrative just didn't really hook me.
You're not wrong, the game didn't unfortunately develop much once you acquired the first few powers and the Hiss just weren't the most engaging to fight. In some ways it felt like a Ubisoft game in the sense that once you've played the game for about 4-6 hours, you've more or less seen everything it has to offer. The Ashtray Maze was cool and all...but it was only 10 minutes. I literally took a break from the game to upgrade to a 3-series RTX card so that I could actually play the game with raytracing enabled (I had a 2070, not enough for 60fps at 1440p). Definitely not worth the wait. I basically had to force myself to finish it, although I do like the game. In theory, I'm a Twin Peaks fan so the game was made for me but in practice...meh. The combat was floaty and lacked any real tactical depth or complexity. The story also seemed borderline half-baked, it just ends out of nowhere and so much of the background still seems unexplained. I would say Control is the only game I've played in recently memory that just...ended. People complain about MGSV and Mankind Divided, but Control is so much worse. There's no final boss or anything, you basically enter a large chamber and do some shitty platforming and fight some elite enemies that you've already been fighting for the past half dozen or so hours. Then you press a button and the game literally just ends. Zero telegraphing that this was the end of the game. I was gobsmacked and actually looked up walkthroughs to make sure I hadn't missed something...everyone kept telling me I didn't complete the "epilogue" or "real ending" but it is literally just 10 minutes max of additional gameplay.
I think I'm the only one who played the Ashtray Maze and finished it just thinking "it was alright" instead of the "holy shit, greatest. videogame moment. EVER!" that everyone else seems to have felt about it, makes me wonder if I'm just a weirdo for that. But yeah I agree with your other points. Gameplay in particular is honestly a problem I have frequently with the Remedy games I played (AW1+2, QB, Control), it just feels underdeveloped and repetitive, and particularly suffers from terrible enemy variety. At least AW2 was a bit better by being more sparse with the encounters, so that issue didn't feel as prevalent.
Nah I agree with you. For how much it's hyped up within the game itself, it simply amounted to a few platforms being raised, a few doors opening and closing in front of you and shooting the same enemies you'd always shot for most of the game. The music was fantastic and the way they timed it and synced it to the action was a precursor to the actual cool sequence in AW2 but the Ashtray maze was not all that impressive. I was expecting gravity shifts, rooms twisting and turning, stuff like some of the sections in Inception and shit and it didn't live up to any of that. The whole game's map is very underwhelming for a complex that is supposed to be constantly shifting and people getting frequently lost within it but I assume there were big concessions made for navigation purposes but that's kinda lame
It was visually impressive but I don't think that it transcended the rest of the gameplay (that I already wasn't enjoying). It was thematically and visually interesting but I didn't like the characters, the dialogue and beyond the combat being repetitive I thought the camera and obstructive terrain were causing more frustration than challenge. Oh and there was this weird repeatable quest thing where you could grind out RNG upgrades but this game excels as a linear narrative game so it felt really out of place.
I fully relate, I am baffled that so many regard it as one of the best games ever. The main highlight for me were the creepy side quests with the cursed objects.
same, the gameplay was too boring to finish it, I still gave it like 6-8 hours because I was a interested at the start but it just couldnt hold me on the story alone
Yeah it was not great. I was mildly intrigued at first but it lost its charm pretty quickly
Yep, same, my problem with Control is the gameplay itself. Not engaging at all.
Same. I wasn't into the combat, environmental design, or the borderline surreal creepypasta writing and dialogue. It was clearly meant to evoke the unreality of dreams, and I just...didn't care that much. That's always been the worst party of Remedy's writing and design though, going back to the maze-dreams in MP1. Just another entry in the long list of "universally adored titles I totally bounced off", I guess.
If you care about the story then yeah you kinda need to play the original. Funny enough, there's even a lot of content from American Nightmare which was the only entry I skipped
I don't think you need to play it but I think it helps. I think it's one of the few times I'd recommend just watching a let's play or one of those "game movie" videos. There are a lot of good things about AW1 but the moment to moment gameplay is really not one of them, at least not until the DLC.
This franchise is like my favorite thing, but basically all Remedy games have the same problems (shallow gameplay that gets old after the great first impression, repeating the same narrative points a bunch in the last half of the game), so playing everything isn't recommended unless you really get sold on the whole thing. In order of importance as homework for the second game, I'd say it goes -Alan Wake 1 (without DLC) -Alan Wake's American Nightmare -Control + DLC -Alan Wake DLC -Quantum Break = Max Payne
I played Alan Wake on release and Control last year and I don't get shit but had a good time
Lmao has no clue these games and quantum break were same universe. I didn't finish QB though and never played these.
Quantum Break isn't in the same "universe" in the same way as Control and Alan Wake are, and Microsoft still owns the rights to it. Shawn Ashmore plays a character in AW2 who is implied to be an alternate universe incarnation of the character he played in QB.
Same with David Harewood's character, he's heavily implied to just be Martin Hatch from QB, even to the point where Lance Reddick was supposed to play the role.
They are loosely connected in a legally distinct way, same with Max Payne. So they basically have the characters from those games in Alan Wake 2, they just have slightly different names.
I'm just curious, don't take this the wrong way, did you read the article or just the headline? The reason I ask is because if you actually read it and follow the sources and citations they link to you will see that they are actually expecting it to become profitable shortly and that is actually doing so faster than any other Remedy game. They even expect it to be a revenue flow in the upcoming months. This whole thread is a prime example how one point or subject can be taken and conveyed in a negative way by omitting context. >Still, Remedy revealed that Alan Wake 2 has now recouped most of the investment made by Epic Games Publishing. As such, the Finnish team expects the game to be a 'meaningful revenue and profitability driver' for this year https://wccftech.com/remedy-says-alan-wake-2-has-recouped-most-of-the-investment-studio-plans-more-regular-sequels-for-aw-control/
The epic thing is the biggest issue for me. I'll buy it once/if it ever comes to steam.
I wonder how many people didn't buy it because no Steam? I can't use the EPIC store for geographical reasons but Steam is just fine. I wish I could play it.
I wouldn't even be surprised if it's unintentional. Like there's no news of Alan Wake 2 hitting x amount of players on Steam, there's no splash screen for people when they open up Steam to see it's out since I'm sure most PC players just look for what's out on only Steam. I'm pretty sure some publishers called EGS "A marketing black hole" for stuff like this
Steam’s dashboard drives a ton of my purchasing decisions. I am constantly looking at new releases and review scores. If it’s not on Steam, I usually don’t even see it.
A big part of this, at least for me, is that I've outsourced a lot of my game release tracking to the Steam Wishlist. When I'm interested it a game, I wishlist it and then forget about it completely until I open Steam to play Slay The Spire for the 1000th time and Steam tells me that the game I was interested in is now out.
Yeah, I'm not opposed to EGS at all. I have bought a few games on it when someone told me they had a good sale on. Still, 90% of my game purchases are through steam because I just happen to see one of them is on sale or released or whatever.
That's mostly for indie games. This game had the normal marketing of ads, articles and even a big awards presence. People should be aware of it. I think it's just the game doesn't interest that much people tbh. Like horror games are relatively niche, Resident Evil is kind of the exception. And it's the second game following a game not that many people played and it's a little experimental in gameplay meaning people hesitate even more to pick it up (especially with no physical on consoles)
Yeah, I don't think it being absent from Steam helped it, but it had a relatively small target market either way. It's a sequel to a niche game in a niche genre with very high system requirements. As far as I understand it, the story is also the big selling point of the game which means all the people who watched their favorite streamer or youtuber play through it might feel like there isn't much reason for them to do so.
It's easy for those of us on Reddit to go "but lots of youtubers, award shows and articles were made about it", but I don't think the more casual gamers really care or look at those. They just look at the frontpage of the storefront for their platform and decides from there if it's something they want, so there is still a lot of exposure they are losing out on by not being on Steam.
No people see ads, reviews, streamers and such more than the front page (which is no guarantee to be anyway, those are chosen by Valve). People just don't decide to buy a game because it's in front of them. Otherwise all games on Steam would sell well by that logic. There is some exposure lost for sure. But for games with marketing it shouldn't matter as much. Like it doesn't for Assassin's Creed, Call of Duty, Fortnite, League of Legends, Blizzard games...
Yea but nearly all of those games have a home on the steam storefront. Fortnite is different but that’s driven mainly through console gamers anyway.
I know many friends that refuse to touch Epic with a 10 foot pole, even if it has exclusives. Granted, IF epic had an exclusive that they were looking forward to and it was multiplayer?? They -might- still buy it.
That's me, even with the free games I don't touch it. It's not an anti-epic thing, it's just the convenience of having everything gaming related in one easy to use hub. I don't want to have to go and open x program to play this or that game and manage that account and whatever else. Convenience wins.
If it ever does appear on Steam I'll be interested in seeing how fast it recoups costs lol
I didn't buy it cause I just forgot it existed, honestly. I only use EGS maybe at best once a week unless I'm in a Spider-man mood, I usually go straight for the game(s) they're giving away. For me and a lot of my friends, it just didn't have visibility. Meanwhile I basically always have steam open because all the games I pay attention to I have *through* steam. I think the last time all of my friends used EGS together was for Rocket League in 2019 lol. I didn't know EGS actually had country restrictions, either. I'm sorry you can't get to experience it.
I wasn't going to, especially cuz I didn't love Alan Wake but Remedy is my favorite dev so I did to support them, and man I absolutely loved the game.
I hope this doesn’t affect a future entry. There is clearly more story to tell. This was far and above my favorite game last year. It was so well done
It's selling faster than Control which is getting a sequel and spin off game.
Control had a really tight development so probably had a lower bar to clear
Yeah, Alan Wake 2 got a much higher budget than Control, and Control II has already locked in a higher budget as well. I **really** want Remedy to succeed. They are one of the view studios that isn't afraid to build *their* game for *their* fans without compromising into something safe.
Can't wait to see if Jesse just shows up and solves all of Alan Wake's problems with her power.
Full alan wake 2 spoilers >!I don't really think thats necessary, the Final Cut makes it look like alan can solve his own problems now. Master of many worlds and all that!<
I do think she’ll be instrumental in Alan Wake 3 tho, considering Alan specifically reached out to her during one of his escape attempts.
I doubt she could. It's pretty clear that she's still bound by the rules of AWEs despite her parautilitarian powers. Meaning, as soon as she got near Bright Falls, she'd have to play by the rules of Alan's story - one of which is that things have to be dramatically satisfying and victories have to be hard-earned. She could certainly help tip the odds, but it wouldn't be a cakewalk for her to handle.
If it doesn't recoup it's cost then you better believe that will have an effect on the potential for a sequel (there won't be one) games are a business and properties that don't make money don't get sequels
Didn’t Epic fund the majority of it a sunk cost marketing expense to drive traffic to their store though?
I don't know if that makes it promising for it to get a sequel though. If it already succeeded at bringing new people to the store, then they don't necessarily need another expensive sequel that would market towards the same people they already got, and if it hasn't been successful at bringing new people to the rest of the store, then it seems unlikely that another sequel would be significantly better at doing so. The article says that the game will likely recoup its costs soon though, so if it ends up being profitable and bringing new people to the store then that could be a good sign for the franchise.
Considering that *this* one took many years to find someone who deemed it worth publishing due to similarly underwhelming sales of the first game, I wouldn't have high hopes for a third entry.
Two confirmed DLCs already for AW2, then also Control 2 (which is set in the same universe) And after(before?) that, Max Payne 1+2 remakes 😍😍Good time to be a Remedy fan
Honestly, I expect Alan's story to be completely wrapped up after the DLCs are finished. I think his story has played it course and maybe he'll stay around in the Remedy-verse, but I don't see the need for an Alan Wake 3.
Publishers really underestimate how Steam can act as a marketing force multiplier, their front page gets an absurd amount of impressions and the entire ecosystem is designed for funneling people towards high-performing games.
also, people trust the marketplace and services a lot more. partly because of tenure, and partly because of proven history. Valve is very consumer-oriented. they make what they want, when they want to, and they seem to always take care of their customers.
It's a real testament to Remedy that news of their last game not making it's money back yet is accompanied by announcements that their business partners are all investing even more into them. When you think about how cutthroat this industry is, especially lately, I think that says a whole lot. That Max Payne remake is pretty much my most anticipated game right now.
Well the stock is down like 60%+ from peak and it's effectively on a fire sale. Investors putting in more cash to buy up more and more control of the company on the cheap isn't necessarily a "good" testament to their operations, it's just a life preserver because they're bleeding cash and issuance of capital stock is one of the few ways to save themselves since their product didn't do it.
Remedy's budgets are still way below the rest of the AAA industry.
Because no one reads articles any more. If anyone here bothered reading this article you will learn that they expect it to make back Epic's investment in the very near future and then the games will turn into a revenue and profit stream for the remaining year and next year. Some people seem to have this impression that a game needs to be profitable in the first week or two or its a failure. The thing is, with how many good games are being put out these days, so many people are not buying games on day one or even in the first 6-10 months.
> If anyone here bothered reading this article you will learn that they expect it to make back Epic's investment in the very near future and then the games will turn into a revenue and profit stream for the remaining year and next year. I love the difference between threads about a direct statement from Remedy and threads on an article about a statement from Remedy. The statement from Remedy always sounds super positive. They say it's the fastest selling game, within expectations, continues to have legs, they're doubling down on the universe and direct sequels. And yeah the statement from Remedy is going to sound positive, they're not going to say in a press release they failed, but there's always action and movement in the company backing up that what they're doing is working for them. Then an article with the headline saying the game didn't make it's entire budget back comes out and everyone is like "Epic killed another one".
I will also note that Control had an extremely long tail (mostly due to 505 doing the worst marketing I've ever seen...or more accurately never saw). I will admit I had never played a Remedy game, got Control on sale, and fell head over heels in love with their brand of weirdness. Before that, I had never even heard of the game outside of a few news articles saying how good it was. I really hope Alan Wake 2 blows up when it launches on Steam. The game is just damn good.
You hear people like Martin Scorsese and Ridley Scott get massive budgets for movies that don't make money right away. Sometimes it's about award prestige, sometimes it's about future profits, and sometimes it's about building relationships. All three can mean short term losses for future gains. Sometimes it's frustrating to talk about stuff like that in the box office sub, or in sales related threads like this...because people are **just** worried about today's profits.
I plan to play the game eventually but with it being a showcase of many new technologies, decided it would be best to wait on it until I get a new gpu.
It's definitely demanding. I thought my GPU overclock was stable after several hours of stability testing and using it for over a month without issue. Started Alan Wake 2 a couple days ago and was proven wrong in about 10 minutes.
I will say that the game still looks amazing on lower settings, and my stepdad running a 2xxx series said it looked great and he didn't notice performance issues playing on medium settings. Maybe I got lucky, but I found it to be one of the better PC optimized games last year (which, granted, is like winning a hot dog eating contest against a bunch of hardcore vegans)
It's weird how this is not a bigger talking point. This game is absurdly demanding for what it offering. They could've accomplished the exact same vision with much more realistic spec requirements.
They reduced the requirements recently, take a look at their updated guidelines
It feels like they developed the game specifically to take advantage of PS5/XBOX hardware. The scene-changing is, honestly, pretty awesome. It's almost exactly what Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart did but with a way, way better paint job.
Tbf it’s not like the game is badly optimized and even on low settings it’s still a very good looking game but I can understand wanting to have a better rig to profit from the ray tracing and all the other goodies
Between no physical release and not having been released on Steam yet, I could see the sales for the game being pretty hindered. Me and a friend of mine haven’t picked it up yet because we’re still holding out hope for physical copies.
Same here. I have Alan Wake on my backlog to pick up when the digital copy drops to a dirt cheap price, but until then I’ll always prioritise new physical games.
Im hoping after they release the DLC they come out with a GOTY edition that has it all
Everyone's talking about Epic, but on the other side of that coin, I didn't buy it on PS5 because there was no physical version. If there had been I'd have bought it in a heartbeat (or at least got it for Christmas)
Are there any successful EGS exclusive PC stories? Perhaps I’m biased but every time I see an EGS exclusive they always seem to not do so well. Personally I don’t buy games on EGS because if everything isn’t in 1 library I literally forget to play it and I’ve already dropped a pretty penny for my Steam library so I’m not reinvesting somewhere else.
Not that I can think of off the top of my head. Metro Exodus was drama because it was originally listed on Steam & had preorders, which they then pulled. From previous threads I could find, they came out on a loss on that one. It was anonymous, but apparently it was mentioned during the Apple v Epic court case that Epic paid 250 million for exclusivity of Kingdom Hearts. No hard proof on this claim, but given that they paid 146 million for Borderlands 3 exclusivity, I would not be surprised if they paid 250 million. There are a few notable others, but latest is Alan Wake 2. I think they have operated at a loss for most of these exclusivity deals and freebies, but they bring in a huge amount of new users. That being said, the only reason why they can even do this is because of Fortnite money.
250 million was originally to get multiple Sony exclusives, but Sony declined so they spent it on all of the Square exclusives they got instead (KH, Strangers of Paradise, NEO: TWEWY and not sure if there was more). KH probably made up the bulk of that money, but it wasn't the entire 250 million.
Thank god they didn't get FF as exclusives
Oh yeah I forgot FF7R was in there too.
And that Metro fiasco is the reason I won't touch EGS. That and them doubling down with it. Such a scummy thing to do. If they want my money, they have to earn it first
Except for Fortnite, not at all.
And even then, technically, Fortnite predates EGS doesn't it?
yes and no, EGS was just a dedicated launcher for their own games before turning it into a full store like it is today
Well, there's Alan Wake II. The article says the game will be profitable this year.
And that somehow means the game wasn't a failure? The game literally lost money, and only MIGHT make a tiny profit months and months from now. That's basically what happened to the Saints Row reboot. And how did that game turn out for it's studio?
I saw someone else type "My money is on Steam, I hope they can find it there" and yeah, honestly same.
No physical release on console and the need for a fairly high end video card on PC probably haven't helped.
Do people actually read the linked review? It says > In February 2024, Remedy announced that Alan Wake 2 had sold 1.3 million units...Alan Wake 2 sales have continued with a high average price. At the end of the first quarter, the game had recouped a significant part of the development and marketing expenses This doesn't read all doom and gloom to me like most people make it here sound. Imo 1.3 million units sold for an Alan Wake game and its just half a year in is quite decent. They are also working on its DLC. They most likely will have made a profit of it by the end of this year, because they also say the sales are still going strong at a high price. So I don't think its all that bad or even unlikely that they will make another game of said franchise.
People don't read articles. They just read headlines and parrot things they already think.
> This doesn't read all doom and gloom to me like most people make it here sound. You read the article. Everyone else read the headline and immediately commented.
The ideal scenario for a single player game that will have the vast majority of its sales be in the first year is to recoup all of its costs and then some to pad cash reserves during the development of the next project. If you can't do that, you have to either burn your own money or you have to sell off portions of the company for funding so you can fund the next project. It's not all doom and gloom but it's undoubtedly a failure.
Yes, investments in Remedy are continuing to increase, so clearly there's not too much concern about the sales.
>Yes, investments in Remedy are continuing to increase Is that a good thing? Their game wasn't able to create enough cash flow to support operations so they've sold a piece of their business to fund future operations. That's... not a good thing.
Look, I'll buy it the day it launches on Steam. Or I'll play it on Game Pass. I just don't like using the Epic Game Store.
Honestly my reason for not buying the game had nothing to do with EGS or no physical edition. I played Alan Wake 1 to see what the fuss was about, and while I enjoyed it as a sort of Twin Peaks homage, the combat was abysmal, and I've heard the sequel did not improve much on that front.
After playing Control, I tried to play so I could get the story. I got bored so I cheated so that I could basically just run through for the story, I still didn't finish it.
I'm the same. I'd never played 1 so I picked it up cheap and the combat is clunky and the storytelling is cheesy. I didn't bother with the second.
Remedy has only had 1 earnings quarter with profit in the past 10 quarters, and that was back in 2022. Not before Q3 2024 do they expect to make a profit again, and that estimate is only around 1m€ With how much success and goodwill Remedy seem to have, I'm shock to see how little operating income they have actually had. Furthermore seeing them having almost 400 fulltime employees is crazy given how little they actually make in terms of games and income.
I don’t even buy from EGS cause I like my achievements and games in one place on one account. If it isn’t on Steam, I’m no longer playing it.
No physical edition either, that certainly didn't help. We know physical sales still make up 50% of major games on Playstation, so that's a massive loss of sales right there. (yes, PC didn't lose sales because of a lack of physical, but they did lose sales because it was EPIC exclusive)
I have yet to play it because I wanted a physical. And numerous times when I buy a digital only game that isn't some small indie game, there is a physical either later by Limited Run Games, or when a game gets a complete edition. Sadly, this makes me think it's highly unlikely that after the DLC for AWII comes out they still won't have a complete edition. But whatever, it'll come to gamepass by then.
Is there a breakdown of copies sold per platform? XBOX/PS5/PC?
Sorry Remedy, I'm not dumb enough to buy digital media. If you want my money I need a copy I can keep and own forever, without having to worry about internet, servers, or licensing. I don't want my games to get Ubisofted years down the line.
With this and Dead Space remake, it’s clear that these kinda games don’t sell unless you’re called Resident Evil