Assassin’s Creed 3 and Far Cry 4 developer Alex Hutchinson’s latest game, Revenge of the Savage Planet, is a very fun co-op adventure game that’s brought in millions of players across Xbox, PlayStation and PC. Unfortunately, in the modern games industry, millions of players doesn’t always equal a lot of money, with Hutchinson telling FRVR that the game simply “hasn’t monetised as well as we would like”.
Hutchinson, who started new studio Racoon Logic after his previous company Typhoon Studios was shuttered by Google, explained that the game has not made as much money as the team would’ve liked. The studio, which Hutchinson says is “AAA quality, AA size” released the game on Xbox Game Pass, which resulted in millions of gamers playing through the game, but that doesn’t always lead to huge sales.
“We’ve had millions of players and that’s great, but people have an expectation of getting things for free these days—whether that’s through Game Pass or other things—it hasn’t monetised as well as we would like, which is pretty dangerous,” the creative director said. “It’s not a super cheap game, and it’s not a game we get royalties on until you repay the advance because Tencent essentially funded it.”
Hutchinson explained that this particular state is a “tricky situation to be in, especially for a AA developer”. While the game saw a pretty substantial player count on launch due to its Xbox Game Pass launch on Xbox and PC, very few have purchased the game or bought its $10 Cosmic Hoader Upgrade.
“It’s a golden age of volume and quality of games. So it’s very hard to break through.”
Revenge of the Savage Planet creative director Alex Hutchinson
While Microsoft claimed that Xbox Game Pass users bought more games and DLCs than other gamers in 2021, that doesn’t mean that every game benefits from that statistic. Hutchinson explains that this data is definitely on a “case-by-case basis”, and sadly Savage Planet hasn’t seen that action despite quite high reviews from critics and players.
“The only thing that disappoints me about the Game Pass audience at the moment is, like, we have over a million players on Game Pass, which is awesome, you know, and they got it for free and we have a $10 pack to get a whole bunch of new missions and stuff. Just 10 bucks and the attach rate for that has just been appalling.
“What it says is, if you give stuff for free, then what you’ve done is told people not to pay for it. You know, I thought, ‘Oh, you get the game for free, so buy the expansion pack’. That was the pitch. But we have the worst attach rate for the expansion pack on Game Pass. So the people that paid for the main game buy the expansion, and the people that didn’t pay for the main game don’t pay for anything. It’s just tricky. There’s great reasons to do it, and there’s reasons not to do it.”
The creative director explained that gamers are now looking for more hefty discounts on games that aren’t major hits. “You can see the concurrent numbers on Hell Is Us, Eternal Strands, to talk about two other games that came out of Montreal that would be in that AA space recently, You know, both great games, and people are waiting for them to 95% off on Steam”.
Hutchinson explained that the sheer openness of the games industry—while definitely not a bad thing for consumers—has changed how gamers decide where to put their money. Backward compatibility plus digital game sales plus frequent heavy sales means that developers are now competing with more of their back catalogue than ever before.
“I think you can [battle that],” they explained. “I think it’s existentially dangerous for a lot of developers in that, in the old days, there was such a technological leap or such a visual leap between console generations—and you couldn’t play your old stuff on the new hardware—so both those things meant that people shelled out for new games a little bit. So, there was a window every six years or so.
“But now with backward compatibility and with subscription services and with giveaways and free games and the back catalogue being ever-present on Steam, yeah, it’s a golden age of volume and quality of games. So it’s very hard to break through.”
Hutchinson explained that the games industry is a very “hit-driven business”, and games like Rocket League sometimes have to try multiple times to actually take off. “Sometimes things do come back around,” he said, “one upside of the backlog situation is that your game is forever on sale.” On the other hand, Hutchinson explained that developers are not competing with themselves, saying: “Far Cry 4 entered Game Pass the same day Savage Planet went into Game Pass which is some kind of dark joke… we’re competing with ourselves a lot of the time, or our own back catalogue.”
Hutchinson is correct. There is now more competition than ever before, and more reasons not to buy a game on release. On the other side, there is always a time where a game can have a major resurgence, a major second wind, which hopefully will happen for Revenge of the Savage Planet one day.
Nevertheless, it seems that Revenge of the Savage Planet has done well enough. While the game hasn’t sold to the team’s expectations, there are still frequent updates for the co-op arcade Metroidvania with Remix Mode launching last September as a free update.
