Did you also not know that Will Smith is starring in a zombie shooter for mobiles and PCs, developed by Chinese company Tencent? Don't worry, you're hardly the only one. The title hasn't attracted either gamers or critics to any great extent, and now the developers have come out and told Reuters what a huge flop Undawn is, eight months after its launch.
The title, boasting a budget of around $140 million - roughly twice as much as, say, Sucker Punch's massive samurai adventure Ghost of Tsushima - has made only a fraction of that back. More precisely, it is estimated to have made $287,000, a mere 0.2% (!) of the total budget. The player peak was reached shortly after launch at just over 8.5 thousand simultaneous players on Steam, but then dropped sharply and now averages around 900 per month.
In the latest quarterly report, Tencent's chief strategy officer James Mitchell told investors that, largely due to the disastrous outcome of Undawn, they will now focus their game development on better-known series, simpler party titles and Genshin Impact-like anime role-playing games instead.
Tencents chief strategy officer James Mitchell:
We're focusing on fewer bigger budget games, [...] Typically, we're seeking to make the biggest bets around games that either iterate on a successful IP...or games that are iterating around proven gameplay success within a niche and taking those to a more mass market."