With the critical and commercial success of FromSoftware’sElden Ringin 2022, it wasn’t surprising that many studios had pushed for their own Souls-like game. While some games likeLies of Pmanaged to find success, other games didn’t do quite as well.
There’s one popular Souls-like game that was released a year after Elden Ring, and while its developer has given it tons of support, it seems its publisher has yet to recoup the cost of developing it.
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This Is One Lord Not Yet The King Of His Castle
The game I’m referring to is HexWorks' Lords of the Fallen, a Souls-like game released in 2023 that acted as a reboot of sorts for the action game. While publisher CI Games hasn’t revealed the latest sales data for the game, they did announce that it has sold a million copies in its first 10 days of availability, which is no small feat.
It seems that’s not enough, as here we are, closing in on the game’s second year, and the RPG has yet to recoup its development budget. CI Games CEO Marek Tyminski revealed this on X, where the executive acknowledged the recent surge in sales thanks to a massive update released this month.
As you can see, Tyminski has confirmed that the game hasn’t even broke even yet, which means they have yet to be profitable when it comes to the game. That might be the case now, but the game is trending upwards! Even 18 months after launch, the game managed to hit a concurrent peak of 10K players on Steam alone.
That 10K playercount is just for Steam, so there’s a very big possibility that the number is more than doubled if you factor in players on PS5, Xbox Series X|S.
It’s surprising to hear that Lords of the Fallen hasn’t made its budget back, considering the number of units it has sold. Hopefully, CI Games didn’t have an unrealistic sales target. Even without breaking even, CI Games is proceeding with a sequel that’s set for release in 2026.
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While Lords of the Fallen didn’t exactly wow critics when it was released (as evidenced by its “Fair"Open Critic rating), HexWorks pushed out title updates nonstop, fixing bugs, adding community-requested features, and much more.
Will that be enough to make the game profitable for publisher CI Games? Let’s hope so since the developers' post-release support is something other studios should emulate.
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Lords of the Fallen
WHERE TO PLAY
Lords of the Fallen is a 2023 soulslike that sees you battle horrifying monsters as you traverse between the Axiom and Umbral realms on a quest to kill Adyr, the demon god.
