Well, It seems that just as The Walking Dead: The Final Season interrupted its unlucky streak and found itself a new home, another game based on the same IP ran into trouble for selling better than expected in low-income countries.
Starbreeze claim that the game's unexpectedly high sales in "low-price countries, Such as China and Russia" were actually the reason behind the company's disappointing revenue. Unit sales are apparently doing fine - it's the dollar sales that don't really meet their expectations.
Starbreeze's CEO Sebastian Ahlskog stressed however that this will not affect their plans for ongoing support of Overkill's The Walking Dead. "We have a pulse of concurrent players, which is essential to future performance within the framework of our Games as a Service concept", he added.
Ironically enough, Starbreeze would've had a much easier time with finances had console versions of Overkill's The Walking Dead launched together with the PC. Latest market research shows that console users are much more likely to spend big, with even more recent research showing they indeed do, but that's the power of hindsight.
Instead, the publisher will have to weather the fourth quarter of 2018, which includes not being "able to recognize the license fee from 505 Games for Overkill's The Walking Dead as revenue until the end of the fourth quarter". The aforementioned license fee amounts to $10 million by the way, which explains why Starbreeze have initiated cost-cutting programs and fully plan to "sharpen focus on core business", which basically means some form of restructuring.
In case you're not familiar with Overkill's The Walking Dead, it's a co-op survival game that's practically a polar opposite of Telltale's narrative laden games. Unfortunately for Starbreeze, the reviews seemed to inherit the, ahem, polar alignment, even though it's still early days.
Starbreeze
So there you have it, both endangered The Walking Dead games will be just fine, even if we can't say the same for the development teams behind them. Granted, "Telltale's Curse" probably would've sounded way cooler but reality wins again.
Overkill's The Walking Dead, a new TWD flavoured co-op shooter
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