"We basically had to launch a game before we ran out of money. "We were all in, for sure - but I still have my house," Morin chuckles. "Every time we did sales projections for Outlast over the next year, they were always below the actual sales"
Outlast 2 release date Pc#
When the PC version shipped in September 2013, the Red Barrels bank account was virtually empty.
Outlast 2 release date full#
Along a handful deals that brought in contractors for below market rate in exchange for a small slice of eventual revenue, the full production budget for Outlast was $1.36 million CAD. Ultimately, Red Barrels found an investor in the form of the Canada Media Fund - you can read about that process in more detail here - through which it raised $1 million to add to money from personal savings and loans. "There was no interest, and the reason mainly was that, although there was a minimum amount of money we think we can make it for, we cannot reach a big enough audience." "David and I tried to convince Ubisoft Montreal to let us work on a horror concept in around 2009," he adds.
Outlast 2 release date free#
Outlast reaped the benefits of being free through PS Plus, and attracting the attention of the emerging streamer community
On the publisher side, Morin observed a lack of belief: in the potential for a bigger, more expensive indie game to make money on digital platforms, and in the demand for the horror genre itself. Maybe on that side there was a lack of knowledge or understanding in terms of the industry." The thing we were hearing the most was that they'd rather invest $50,000 in ten projects than $500,000 in us. "On the VC side, it was still the mobile bubble. We were 18 months without a salary, except for little contracts here and there. "We couldn't find anybody to invest," Morin recall. Despite the pedigree of Red Barrels' team, however, funding Outlast was far more difficult than anyone predicted. However, it was 2011, and the common perception of digital indie games was out of line with Red Barrels' goal: to establish a model that reduced the financial risk associated with what Morin calls "single-player action-adventure type games", while still offering scale and production values that resembled a AAA release. According to Morin, Red Barrels' CEO, starting a studio was the only way to make that kind of game, "without having to worry about all of the stuff that big studios have to worry about." Red Barrels was started when their project at EA was cancelled and, recognising that single-player action-adventure games were becoming harder to get off the ground at big publishers, they decided to take matters into their own hands. That much is evident from its co-founders David Chateauneuf, Hugo Dallaire and Philippe Morin, all of whom had worked at both Ubisoft Montreal and EA Montreal.
"We'll never know what the first month sales would have been without PS Plus, but I personally think it was the right move" Track back to 2013, though, and you'll see that Red Barrels had already laid the groundwork. I attended a panel at Berlin's Quo Vadis conference recently, which discussed "AAA indies" as an emerging trend, one galvanised by the launch of Ninja Theory's excellent Hellblade last year. In terms of content, Gears of War and Outlast have very little in common, of course, but we may come to see Red Barrels' debut as one of the more quietly important games of the PS4/Xbox One era. It just didn't feel that way at the time.
By the time Xbox One and PlayStation 4 arrived, however, Gears' influence seemed to be everywhere, from the feel of its characters to the position of the camera to the importance of cover in its combat system.Īdd in the second game's "Horde" multiplayer mode, and one could make a convincing case for it being the most influential IP of the entire generation. Most of the time, though, that kind of recognition arrives with hindsight.įor the last console generation, the best example is Epic's Gears of War, a game that pretty much everybody agreed was fun and visually spectacular when it launched, but many cooled on due to the muscular dude-bros at the heart of its story. Very occasionally, it's possible to see that a game is important or influential before it is released.
0 kommentar(er)
