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Alan Wake 2: Lack Of Sales Update Suggests It Didn’t Sell Too Well

rofif

Can’t Git Gud
RE3 Remake and RE4, for sure. RE2 Remake? Alan Wake has a dodge, a mechanic to remove armor, and fast enemies. Wake has better gameplay than RE 2 Remake. Did you even play it?
Say what. Remake2 might be the best action horror game ever made. No matter of it has some arbitrary dodge or not
 

rofif

Can’t Git Gud
I’ll wait for 1 of the following:
-Steam release
-GoG release
-EGS free giveaway
Exactly. Pc gamers like sales and are used to epic giving away games. Rarely does pc gamer pay full price for a game.

So of course you are going to teach the crowd to wait for sale or giveaway. Especially for single player game.

These very early sales, giveaways and subs are ruining gaming industry. People are cheap and masses will learn to wait. And if that happens, the game doesn’t sell well on release which means it failed and if they make next game it will have to be cheaper to develop or have gaas elements to bring people in for full price day1.
 

rofif

Can’t Git Gud
And this is on console only, right? So it must already be at 1 million if we include PC.
So yeah, I guess it is almost certain it will sell as much as Control did, and if Epic ever releases this on Steam it would do even better.
People don’t buy games full price on epic and aw2 was given for free with graphics cards.
 

rofif

Can’t Git Gud
I think one of my biggest complaints is that it all feel so mundane and they pretty much ignore stuff from the first game and American Nightmare. Sam Lake even admitted he forgot a lot of stuff about the first two games and uses Wikipedia to try to keep everything consistent.

A good example for me is how they mention alien intelligences and lovecraftian beings that supposedly dwell in the Dark Place in the first two games. There's no weird creatures or no appearances by any kind of lovecraftian type being and instead it's just a bunch of shadows. I guess you could count the Dark Presence that only shows up a couple times as one of these beings but all it shows up as is a warp in the air.

They had a chance to really do something interesting with the game and instead pretty much ignore the really interesting parts of the first two games.
Yeah and they just changed Tom into movie maker because now Sam lake can make a movie. He was a diver for a reason, because of couldron lake.
American nightmare is great. They didn’t learn shit from it. But imagine American nightmare now. That game is all about babes in trouble lol
 

coffinbirth

Member
jubc49ozg7u61.jpg

Almost certainly would've caved during Targets B2G1F deal...yet here we are.
 

rofif

Can’t Git Gud
You bought it and only played a few hours? Or maybe you watched a stream and pretending that you bought and played it. You're missing out if so, also what a waste of money, lol! The newer RE games(7&8) are really slow in some parts with long cut scenes. Maybe you're only talking about the Remakes.
Re7 and 8 have some drawbacks but the cutscenes are short and still do not outpace the gameplay. Remakes are even better. Especially 2 and 4. The cutscenes are essentially connecting points. In aw2 even when there is no cutscene, it still feels like it’s is a cutscene you can’t skip. All the mind place crap and dialogue there and all the standing around people mouthing out exposes.

A good, complex story to much for you? AW2 puts Resident Evil to shame. This coming from a lifelong RE fan.
There is nothing complex about aw2 story. Whole complexity comes out from its extremely convoluting story telling which tries too hard to spoonfeed you the story in some arbitrary way.

Re games don’t have good stories. These always were B movies. But re games have memorable characters and gameplay is more important than story in those games.
For re games story exists to give gameplay reason to exist.
For aw2, story is everything and gameplay takes the 2nd place in far back.
 

demigod

Member
Considering Epic funded the game with exclusivity fees of some kind, Remedy probably doesnt care about unit sales. As long as they get marketing/funding to cover costs they are happy. Their game library has a history of hardware platform and e-store exclusivity deals. Being digital only is another limitation on their end, but they dont seem to care about releasing games holistically for everyone.

They know their games have limited appeal and sales, so it's too risky to release them on their own hoping for big sales the traditional way going disc and digital across every key platform at the same time.

BG is different IMO. Even though the last BG game came out 25 years ago (not including those Diablo-ish spin off games), it's still got a legacy across RPG gamers. On the other hand, there is no way the average modern day gamer thinks Alan Wake 1 is such a fantastic game, everyone would be stampeding to buy AW2 no matter how good the reviews are.
This is wrong thinking. Why would you think they don’t care about sales when they get more money for more copies being sold?
 

TastyPastry

Member
i'm just glad max payne remake is already getting financed by rockstar. hopefully that game will sell a lot better so we can get at least max payne 4 from remedy down the line, i don't expect alan wake 3 to ever be thing
 

Godot25

Banned
Not really surprising. Remedy is built on efficient game making and their budgets are fraction of AAA budgets of companies like SIE, EA or Take-Two so obviously they don't need to sell 10 million copies to break even.
Also. Alan Wake was a cult classic but it wasn't a huge commercial success.

So I would not dwell too much on this numbers. I'm sure game will be profitable over time.
 
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balls of snow

Gold Member
Gameplaywise it's pretty evenly divided between the two. Alan is not just a minor supporting character. I preferred Saga's chapters myself, much more fun than Alan's.
Yeah Saga is way more connected to the remedy verse as a whole more than Alan Wake. Especially concerning her lineage you understand why they made her not as white as some might prefer.
 

The Skull

Member
My only issue with the game is Saga's mind place. The amount of wasted time just trying to put the picture in the right place really bogs the game down. If they could have cut that down and used it to change the dark place akin to Alan's changing of the scene, that could have worked and have been more interesting. Still loved it but I can acknowledge the games flaws.
 

Beechos

Member
Should see the numbers go up soon. There a deal where people are getting it for $20 usd via a digital code from egypt and using a VPN to act in their home country.
 

Mr Moose

Member
Should see the numbers go up soon. There a deal where people are getting it for $20 usd via a digital code from egypt and using a VPN to act in their home country.
It's 20% off now, and with a 33% discount code you can get it for £21/$25 with a free copy of the first game.
 

gerth666

Member
This pleases me. I've nothing against the the game, I actually want to play it, even though the first one is one of the most over hyped crappy games I've ever played. But to not release a physical copy is criminal in my opinion. It's almost like they wanted it to fail
 

xrnzaaas

Member
My only issue with the game is Saga's mind place. The amount of wasted time just trying to put the picture in the right place really bogs the game down. If they could have cut that down and used it to change the dark place akin to Alan's changing of the scene, that could have worked and have been more interesting. Still loved it but I can acknowledge the games flaws.
Maybe they've invested a lot of resources into designing the Mind Place and didn't want to waste them. Or maybe one of the execs really likes CSI... because it's not difficult to spot this as an absolute time waster which shouldn't be mandatory to progress in Saga's story.
 
I don't think there games sell all that well in general. I mean well enough for them to remain independent but that's about it.
 

Kataploom

Gold Member
They made a game for awards and won several awards. Of course, they also got cut off during their speeches so maybe they shouldve focused on making a more action focused game for their fanbase instead of award shows but what do i kinow.
Nope, Alan Wake should not be action focused but narrative focused, and I'm the first one to critique a game for weak gameplay lol, haven't played it but someone said it was too puzzle focused, maybe that's the way to go but not action pls.
 
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Filben

Member
I wouldn't be surprised. And I really enjoy it and find it well-made for a cinematic third person shooter. However, I can see it totally not mainstream enough too attract a big audience and huge sale numbers. But this doesn't have to be a bad thing because making games for the biggest audience possible, although granting you likely financial success, can make games stale quality-wise. There are some good video games (also films, if we want to compare a different genre) that bombed but where critically acclaimed.

I'd rather take a rarely seen way of storytelling then the next formulaic (Ubisoft...) game.

Also, with the money from Epic you can take such risks, without the incentive to earn as much money as possible from sales. It simply doesn't have to perform that well on sales numbers to be financial success.
 
I bought it together with Hogwarts Legacy. With the sale discount and the coupon discount it was like 50 euro for both games. I think those are the first actual games I bought on the Epic store. Bought some DLC before for games they gave away for free (The Long Dark and Kingdom Come).
 
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Gojiira

Member
Remedy knows their games arent blockbuster sellers, so they ensure to do marketing partnerships to guarantee a set amount of money to cover the costs. I dont think any games they have made are big sellers. Taking a skim of some of their games on wiki, a game might top out at 3-5M copies after selling for a long time (which would include bargain binning).

Who knows how many copies AW2 will sell... at some point it'll be on Steam... but it'll probably be in the same range.
Skirts around the issue that they would have sold better without the dumb decisions like Xbox exclusivity and EGS…
Sure eventually AW2 will be on Steam but at that point its numbers will essentially boil down to discounted prices during Sales. If they had just released on Steam from the get go it would be a different story.
Gutted Control wasnt a huge hit though, Imo its their best game and one of the standouts from last gen.
 
I would wish Remedy's games would sell more because how unique the studio is.
Well maybe Max Payne remakes sparks things up a little.
 

Alan Wake

Member
No physical discs heh.

You made your bed Remedy, enjoy laying on it.
You really think this is the main issue here? There are lots of games being released digital only and doing very well. I would have loved to buy a physical copy, and even a Collector's Edition. It was a disappointment they made the decision to don't do any of this. But I suspect the Epic exclusive is a bigger factor here. And maybe lack of advertising?
 

Paasei

Member
The only reason I haven’t bought it yet, is because I’m getting worried about performance given my hardware on PC.
 

demigod

Member
You really think this is the main issue here? There are lots of games being released digital only and doing very well. I would have loved to buy a physical copy, and even a Collector's Edition. It was a disappointment they made the decision to don't do any of this. But I suspect the Epic exclusive is a bigger factor here. And maybe lack of advertising?
And how many of them are doing well by being exclusive to EGS?
 
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Lack of disk version, and lack of support across a wide range of GPU's.

This should bring more nuance as to why developers, especially third party will think twice about adopting next-gen features like Mesh Shaders.
 
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