Alan Wake 2's Success And Failure Is A Foreboding Sign

Summary

Alan Wake 2 is hugely successful, but its budget of 70 million euros isn't sustainable in the long run.
The game industry's focus on profit could discourage the creation of unique, innovative games like Alan Wake 2.
Despite financial concerns, the industry needs more weird, audacious games like Alan Wake 2 to thrive creatively.

I haven’t finished , but what I’ve played of it made me gasp, laugh, and scream in equal measure. It’s widely considered one of the best games of 2023, and was a strong contender for Game of the Year against the incredible . It’s won a handful of other awards, been nominated for many more, and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:got 5 out of 5 stars from us, which is totally the most important thing.

It’s a widely-loved game, selling faster than any of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Remedy’s previous efforts, including 2019’s Control. It moved over a million copies in just a coupl🧔e of months, . And y❀et, .

Budgets Are Too Big

Clearly, Alan Wake 2 is still very successful. It’s not that it isn’t a good game (it is) or that it isn’t marketable (it is). But the game’s budget was 70 million euros – that’s 50 million for development, and 20 million on marketing. That’s about 54 million USD and 21.5 million USD, for the record. That’s a huge budget, and it’s not even the exception – Baldur’s Gate 3 cost more than 100 million USD. The Last of Us Part 2 cost 200 million USD. Horizon Forbidden West cost 212 million USD. Alan Wake 2 is on t⭕he lower end of triple-A budgets right now, and imagine the blow was softened significantly thanks to a publishing partnership with Epic Games.

Right now, games often cost the same to make as a major Hollywood movie does. It can take months,൩ even years, for studios to earn back the money they put in. This makes me worry. Gaming is a very profit-driven industry, which is why more and more studios have turned to live-service under the pressure of having to generate exponential profits, even though gamers are turning away from the genre altogether because there are too many live-service titles and so many of them have extractive, exploitative business models.

Art Isn't Always Profitable

I don’t doubt that Alan Wake 2 will eventually recoup its development costs. I think it’ll happen soon – it’s most of the way there after less than four months, and the game is likely to have a long tail. But the game has not been an immediate profit generator, nor will it bring money in forever. Dꦉespite being critically lauded and one of the most unique games of the last decade, weird games like Alan Wake 2 don’t generally make studios absurd amounts of money with the snap of a finger. This isn’t Fortnite.

And what worries me is that executives will see this and think that stranger games, no matter how innovative and how much they contribute to the medium, aren’t worth making because the🔴y won’t immediately make CEOs and shareholders bank. I fear that they’ll take it as a sign that unique gems like Alan Wake 2 shouldn’t be made because they don’t rake in hundreds of millions of dollars at the drop of a hat. The harsh truth is that the majority of art worth ma♎king isn’t an instant success.

I want weirdo single-player games to proliferate. I want more Alan Wake 2s, more games that leave me dumbfounded at the risks they take and the audacity of their storytelling. I want studios to get unapologetically surreal. I want to play more games clearly made by silly little freaks. As a player, and as a critic, I know that how much money a game makes is not a reflection of how much it deserves to exist. But unfortunately, I’m not one of the people that decides what games get made, and thinking ▨about the future of the industry makes m💛e nervous.