The team behind Square Enix's Outriders is yet to receive any royalties for the game and doesn't even know how well it has performed so far in terms of sales.
Delays to release dates have made 2021 feel like a slow year for new games so far. However, if you look back at the first seven months, we've actually been pretty spoiled considering the circumstances. Hitman, Pokemon Snap, Resident Evil Village, just to name a few. Square Enix also launched Outriders, the popularity of which feels as if it fell off far more quickly than expected.
So much so that a recent interview with Sebastian Wojciechowski suggests Outriders hasn't even come close to performing as expected. Wojciechowski is the president of People Can Fly, the studio responsible for developing Outriders. He revealed to Eurogamer that Square is yet to reveal how many copies of Outriders have been sold so far, which also means People Can Fly is yet to receive any royalties for the game.
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“We do not have any data on the sales of Outriders. We estimate it at between two and three million copies,” Wojciechowski explained in an interview that has been translated from Polish. “The lack of payment by the publisher probably means that… this is not the case.”
Since People Can Fly is yet to receive royalties for Outriders, it likely means the cost of production, promotion, and distribution wasn't covered during the game's first quarter. That means one of two things. Either the game isn't performing as well as Square hoped, or those costs were higher than expected. The game was plagued with problems at launch, so there's every chance it's the former that has resulted in People Can Fly being left in the dark.
Despite the bugs and issues at launch, Outriders surpassed 3.5 million players during its first month. However, the game also launched on Game Pass, the success of which Square boasted about very early on. Its player count during that first month may have led People Can Fly to assume sales were better than they actually were. Despite the lack of royalties and concrete sales info, Wojciechowski confirms that work on Outriders' future continues.
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