Dead Space 2 Cost $60 Million, Sold Only 4 Million Units Worldwide
With the sad news of EA Games shutting down one of its video game studio Visceral Games. one former employee and developer from Visceral Games has come forward to reveal some rather shocking news.
Zach Wilson a former level designer at Visceral who now works a Bethesda revealed that the cost of making Dead Space 2 was $60 million. but was able to sell only 4 million copies of the game and that was not enough to recover the cost of production of the game.
By taking into the account of the cost of marketing, the cuts are taken by console manufacturers, online distributors and by offering the discount on the game to promote the game the devs and the publisher may have managed to recover only half the cost of production.
Zach also further explained that why game publishers are making their own marketplace instead of going for platforms like Steam which takes 30% cut. You can check out the tweets from Wilson below
cause you gotta spend 60 million dollars marketing it and you take a huge hit from MS and retailers taking their cut
— Zach Wilson (@covernode) October 17, 2017
I don’t know the exact marketing budget but they’re frequently close to the dev cost (I have heard this anecdotally)
— Zach Wilson (@covernode) October 18, 2017
this also by the way is why you’re seeing every pub make their own digital marketplace. do you hate uplay? Well, the pub gets 90% of the $$$
— Zach Wilson (@covernode) October 18, 2017
Dead Space 2 came in early 2011 and was praised for its gameplay and storyline every game publication site gave it a score of 9/10 or above. it also received the Metacritic score of 90/100 in Xbox 360, 89/100 on PS3 and 87/100 on PC. So why did it fail?
There could be many reasons for the game to fail but the most common reason everyone gives for Dead Space 2 failure is the introduction of poor microtransactions model which was a turn off for the fans of the game. the direction of the game was also said to be unsatisfactory and both devs and publisher expected too much from the title.