Ballooning development budgets are one of the AAA games industry’s biggest issues at present, though certain developers manage to find ways to develop consistently high-quality titles on fairly reasonable budgets. Remedy Entertainment is one of the most prominent studios in that group, and it looks like it’s looking to accomplish something similar with the upcoming Control 2.
During its recent Capital Day Markets 2024 presentation, Remedy Entertainment revealed that Control 2 is being developed on a budget of about €50 million. According to the studio, the sequel, which it has confirmed is going to be an action RPG, will need to sell about 3-4 million units for Remedy to double its investment in the production. The first Control has sold over 4.5 million units, for context. It’s also worth keeping in mind that Control 2 is being co-financed by Annapurna Interactive.
Meanwhile, upcoming co-op spinoff FBC: Firebreak – which has previously been described as a mid-priced title by Remedy – has a development budget of around €30 million. The studio says it will need to sell around 3 million units for a 100 percent return on investment. It should be interesting to see whether the game can achieve those sales while also being available at no cost to PlayStation Plus and Game Pass subscribers.
Either way, both titles are significantly lower budgets than what has become the norm for the AAA industry over the years (though note this doesn’t include marketing budgets). There’s been an abundance of notable examples of games that have cost much, much more to make, including Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 costing $315 million, The Last of Us Part 2 and Horizon Forbidden West having budgets of $200 million each, The Callisto Protocol’s budget standing at $162 million, and Immortals of Aveum’s at $125 million.
Remedy Entertainment’s budgets have, however, been consistently lower than the industry average by a significant margin, and thankfully, that has not reflected in the quality of the games in anyway- on the contrary, one might argue Control and Alan Wake 2 are among the best games to have been released in the last decade.
