Remedy Entertainment, they behind Max Payne and 2019’s Control, made more than twice as much money in 2020 as they did the year before. Yet they didn’t release a new game. They just kept releasing an old one instead.
If you were to stop me in the street and ask me about how things went for Control in 2020, the first thing I’d do is look around myself in a panic and hope you’d go away. But were you to persist, I’d nervously remark that it hadn’t exactly been a stellar year for the game’s reputation, caught up as it was in the most ludicrously bungled upgrade to next-gen consoles. Then I’d distract you by suddenly pointing at a distant roof, and run away as fast as I could. Stop asking strangers questions in the streets, you weirdo.
As reported by GI.biz, the Finnish developer raked in a tidy €13.2m in profit in the 12 months ending December 31st. 2019 saw them bring in just €6.5m. And all it took was releasing Control about seventy or eighty times.
There was the Steam release after its PC version hid itself on the Epic Game Store in 2019. There was an Xbox Game Pass release. There was a “cloud” version on Switch. An Ultimate Edition was then released everywhere. Then there was the clusterfuck of the Xbox Series X/S and PS5 release, where those who had the Ultimate Edition would get it upgraded for free, while those who had the vanilla release did not, even if they’d paid more over time for the DLC, and then all that got delayed to 2021 anyway.
Turns out if you keep on selling something a lot, you make money! Economists, take note.
Remedy is now more fully moving on to newer projects, with a AAA and smaller game in development in collaboration with Epic (so don’t expect to see those on Steam any time soon). They’re also continuing to work with Smilegate’s Crossfire, and their own multiplayer project, Vanguard. What busy bees. Meanwhile, expect to see new releases for Control on N64, BBC Micro and the Casio FX-9750G11 graphics calculator.
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