Ninja Theory studio director and Hellblade’s creative director, Tameem Antoniades, recently had an interview with VentureBeat about the pretensions of game development, and briefly the subject matter touched on the sales data for the studio’s latest outing, Hellblade.
PlayStation Lifestyle captured the relevant bits from the interview relating to the sales data for the game, where Antoniades says…
“I think it’s almost broken even, or it’s about to break even in the next couple of weeks. I’d have to check.” […] “We weren’t expecting to break even for six, eight, nine months on this game. It looks like within three months, it will have broken even and then some.”
The problem is that it’s impossible to tell exactly what “break even” means.
Antoniades doesn’t give any numbers on the budget nor does he state how many units the game needs to move cumulatively to hit that standard. It sold at half the price of a typical AAA title but was actually around the same length as an AAA title, clocking in at anywhere between four to six hours depending on how proficient the player was at the puzzles.
According to Steam Spy the game has moved only 175,000 units. So it only made a total of $5.2 million on Steam. With Valve’s 30% distribution cut, it means that Ninja Theory ended up with $3.6 million in revenue from Steam alone.
Hellblade also launched on GOG.com, and on the PS4. The game has been available since August, and managed to make the number 2 spot on the PlayStation Network’s top 20 chart for August, according to the PlayStation Blog. However, in the following month, the game dropped way off the charts, not even making September’s top 20 most downloaded games, according to the PlayStation Blog.
This seems to indicate that the game had a short spark of interest and then quickly died off thereafter.
According to Antoniades, the game is considered a “success” despite the fact that it hasn’t breached a million in sales…
“We own the IP this time. It’s opened up a bunch of doors and possibilities that we just didn’t have until this point. In terms of a model, I’d say it is a success.”
I’m not sure what Ninja Theory’s projections were for the sales trajectory of the game beyond the first two quarters, but there’s been a massive tapering off since its release in August, both on the PlayStation 4 and on Steam. Perhaps the company will rely on the Steam Winter Sale to help compensate for the stalled interests.
Nevertheless, if the game does manage to become profitable at around 500,000 copies, then Ninja Theory, in some way, will have proven companies like EA and Microsoft wrong when they stated that single-player, linear games with quality graphics require massive AAA-sized budgets to be economically viable and profitable for the company.
