UK independent developer Ninja Theory announced today that Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice has pulled off very interesting sales so far. Here's a lowdown from the press release.
- Over 75K pre-orders across PC and PS4 before launch.
- 250K units sold in the first week at $29.99.
- Over $13m in revenue generated in 3 months.
- 500k units sold in 3 months, which puts the project beyond breakeven and into profit. Our prediction was to be at this point in 6 months from release.
- Development took 3 years and with an average team size of 20.
- Game sold as digital-only.
- About half the sales were on PC.
Tameem Antoniades, Ninja Theory's Co-founder and Chief Creative Ninja, said:
The escalating stakes in the AAA retail publishing model has killed off countless independent studios like us, many smaller publishers, and is now straining even the largest of publishers. This isn't survival of the fittest but a routing of the creative base upon which this industry was built.
The future isn't written and we don't believe that the writing is on the wall. AAA will always exist but we need strong alternatives as well.
Three years ago we announced our intention to find a way to do our best work outside of the AAA retail model and have openly documented the journey in our thirty development diaries.
The final step is to share our commercial model and digital sales data for the benefit of other developers. The more data we have for alternative business models, the more developers can take informed commercial and creative risks. For the benefit of our beloved medium, we'd like to encourage other developers to share their own data as well wherever possible.
Thank you to everyone who has supported us and made Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice a commercial and creative success.
This all sounds truly great and well deserved, too, as Hellblade is a fantastic example of that independent AAA proposition first theorized by Antoniades.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
Follow Wccftech on Google to get more of our news coverage in your feeds.
