Ninja Theory Believes There’s Success in Hellblade’s Independent AAA Model
In a recent interview with VentureBeat’s Dean Takahashi, Ninja Theory’s chief creative director, Tameem Antoniades, spoke a great deal about the Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice. At one point, Antoniades talked about the sales of the game, which is interesting as the game used an “independent AAA” model for the game’s scale and its lower price point.
It sold better than our expectations. We’re doing one more dev diary where we’ll give out numbers and detail how it’s done. We want the data out there so other developers, if they want to do something similar, they have a data point, hopefully, to help encourage them to do more games like this.
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. Of course, because we self-published it, it’s the first time we’re getting the bulk of the money back, which is amazing. 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.
Additionally, Ninja Theory believes that they made the right call by going indie by self-publishing the game. As a mid-size developer, they feel the AAA publishing model isn’t the best fit for them. He adds, “As we’ve seen over the last several years, dozens of good developers have disappeared. The only way you can counter that is find another way. This seems to have worked for us.”
Check out the studio’s developer diaries for the hard numbers to see if this smaller scale AAA experience is a hint of things to come for other studios in the industry.
You can grab Hellblade now on PS4, a game which we praised for its combat and engaging story in our review.
Source: VentureBeat