Don’t ever say there isn’t money in VR game development. Skydance Interactive today announced that its hit zombie-slaying adventure The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners (2020) has now passed the $60 million revenue mark across all supported platforms.
Update (January 24th, 2022): The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners has now reached $60 million in overall revenue—making for a $10 million bump since Skydance last released revenue figures in October 2021. Although not stated explicitly by the studio, this is likely a direct result of Quest 2’s popularity this holiday season.
Here’s some ‘back of the envelope’ math: assuming most of that $10 million was generated through the app on Quest, which regularly costs between $30 and $40 depending on periodic sales, this would indicate that TWD: SS sold between 250,000 – 333,333 units during the three months since they last released revenue figures. That makes for around 1,250,000 – 1,583,000 in copies sold to date.
The original article follows below:
Original Article (October 26, 2021): The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners initially launched on PC VR headsets in late January 2020, immediately garnering critical acclaim for its gritty physics-based combat and immersive zombie-killing action. Having arrived later that year on PSVR and the Oculus Quest platform, the game then celebrated its first year anniversary in January 2021 by announcing it had passed the $29 million revenue mark.
Since then, developers Skydance Interactive announced now they’ve nearly doubled the game’s first year revenue, which no doubt had something to do with the ongoing success of the Oculus Quest 2 headset, which arrived in October 2020.
The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners won Road to VR’s Oculus Quest Game of the Year in 2020 for good reason. Its highly immersive campaign focuses on a truly gruesome level of realism, and provides you with all of the tools necessary to resist hordes of walkers (and human gangs) that populate the murky, post-apocalyptic wards of a shattered New Orleans. It’s a bit like a pared down RPG with some open world elements, and we came to appreciate just how truly made-for-VR the entire thing was.
We gave it a resounding [9/10] in our full review on PC VR back then, however it’s changed a bit since launch in 2020. Saints & Sinners now boasts more than 20 hours of gameplay, which is partly thanks to continuous free content updates that have arrived over the past year. Outside of the truly awesome campaign, the game now includes a wave-based mode called ‘The Trial’ and an expanded bit of campaign in ‘The Aftershocks’ update, which includes a collection of post-game missions.
Here’s of some back of the envelope math, which we should note doesn’t include times when the game was discounted:
The more expensive ‘Tourist Edition’ on PC and PSVR sells for $50. That edition comes with a few digital perks that may not appeal to everyone though, so it’s likely most people purchased the standard $40 edition, which includes the campaign and all of the recent DLC. To date, that may put it somewhere between 1,000,000 – 1,250,000 total units sold across all platforms.
You’d be hard-pressed to find an exact formula for such relatively meteoric success in VR, since these sorts of numbers are still the exception and not the rule, although we’re willing to bet it has something to do with creating an extremely well-crafted game built from the ground-up for VR, hitching it to recognizable IP, and launching it on every headset possible.
