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Lords of the Fallen sold 1 million copies in 10 days, but after two years it didn’t recover development costs.
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Despite not being broken, the game was hit with 10k simultaneous players with 18 months of steam after its release.
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Without recouping the costs, a sequel is planned for the fallen lord in 2026.
It wasn’t surprising that the critical and commercial success of Sotfware’s Elden Ring in 2022 led many studios to promote games like their souls. Some games like Lies of P were able to find success, but others didn’t do much.
There’s one game like Souls, the popular released a year after Elden Ring, and its developers have given it a lot of support, but it doesn’t seem to have recovered the cost of developing it yet.
This is one lord, not king of his castle
The game I’m referring to is Lords of the Fallen by Hexworks, a game like Souls released in 2023. Publisher CI Games has not revealed the latest sales data for the game, but has announced that it sold 1 million copies in the first 10 days of availability, but this is no small feat.
That alone doesn’t seem to be enough. As you can see, we are approaching the second year of the game, and the RPG has not yet recovered development budget. CI Games CEO Marek Tyminski revealed this in X. Here, the executives have confirmed a recent spike in sales thanks to a massive update released this month.
As you can see, Tyminski has confirmed that the game is not yet broken, meaning that it is not profitable when it comes to the game. This may be true now, but the game is on the upside! Even 18 months after its release, the game was able to reach its simultaneous peak of 10K players with steam alone.
Because that 10K PlayerCount is only steam, there is a very high chance that the number will be more than doubled when considering players from the PS5 and Xbox Series X|s.
It’s amazing to hear that they haven’t regained their budget, considering the number of units sold by the fallen lord. Hopefully, CI games didn’t have any unrealistic sales goals. Even if it doesn’t break, CI Games is working on a sequel scheduled for release in 2026.
While Lords of the Fallen didn’t surprise critics when it was released (as evidenced by “fair” open critic reviews), Hexworks pushed title updates non-stop, adding bug fixes and community-recreated features.
Is it enough to make the game profitable for publisher CI games? I hope that post-release support for developers is something other studios should emulate.
