It is very bleak, and hardly Proust, but the combat is great and once you get going it flows along well enough. I hate the endgame but the journey there is well worth the ticket.
Thanks for the replies! Very interesting. I think I’ll jump in.
Announced on the developer’s investor website, People Can Fly explained that the agreement with Square Enix meant it would receive any royalties for the game’s first quarter on sale by August 16, 2021. No funds were transferred, which People Can Fly suggests means that, “according to the Publisher, the revenues from the sale of the game are lower than the total costs of its production (including Quality Assurance), distribution and promotion.”
People Can Fly executive Sebastian Wojciechowski (per a machine translation) added that the company had no firm data for copies sold: “We don’t have any sales figures for Outriders - we estimate it at between 2 and 3 million units and assumed that this was a result that would ensure profitability for this project in the first quarter of sales. The lack of payment by the Publisher probably means that, according to Square Enix, this is not the case.”
Wojciechowski also suggests that a lack of profitability could be caused by the publisher, including distribution partnerships (the game was launched into Xbox Game Pass, for example), or that Square Enix spent more than expected on releasing the game. It wouldn’t be a unique situation for Square Enix – last year, the publisher announced that Marvel’s Avengers had failed to recoup its development costs a few months after launch.
Wojciechowski added that the game was still being worked on, People Can Fly expects more promotional work from Square Enix, and that “the sales tail of the Outriders game is ahead of us.” As a result, the company expects royalties to begin later this year.
I am sure gamepass was huge lump of lost sales.
Like I said up above…
So, sorta like Hollywood, where half the folks involved in a film don’t make a dime until all the fat cats upstream take their cuts?
If that’s not a mistranslation or some anti-publisher PR-speak, then they were pretty stupid to sign a contract where the publisher doesn’t have to report the sales numbers. Obviously if they don’t have to give you the data, the data is always going to be zero.
Aw, man, when I saw this thread got booted, I was hoping Outriders finally got its rebalancing pass. :( I shake my fist at @BrianRubin!
-Tom
My humblest apologies sir.
Looks like they have patched it each of the last 3 months with some buffs and multiplayer improvements Tom.
I am still waiting for Gamepass.
I have this on xbox gamepass. Is it only on console then…?
No, its a PC game as well. That’s where I played through it.
It is only on Game Pass for console though.
Ah, gotcha. Don’t do Game Pass so I don’t follow it much.
And one new patch this very day!
This is on sale at what I assume is a historic low price. Is it worth picking up? - what’s the verdict?
Feel free to point me to whichever one of those is the re-balancing pass they’ve been talking about since shortly after the release. :) But, yes, they’ve been plugging away at smaller issues. As near as I can tell, this comment was the latest word on the larger issues:
That was a month ago. I’m in no real hurry to jump back in, but I’m holding off until they’re done with whatever balance overhaul they’ve been promising.
-Tom
Definitely worth thirty bucks. I got my money’s worth at full ask, with about two full play throughs on different characters.
I enjoyed it. It falls apart in the endgame but I had fun up until then.