The Blood of Dawnwalker launched to impressive review scores, managing to sell over a million copies in just a couple of days. That success is even more impressive because it apparently didn’t cost much to make. $40 million is the magic number, according to Jason Schreier’s new piece on developer Rebel Wolves’ journey to make the game.
Now, there some caveats: according to the report, NetEase gave Rebel Wolves a $40 million development budget, while Bandai Namco agreed to publish the game, meaning they handled things like marketing costs. We have no idea how much that was, nor do we know how all the various splits between the companies are being handled.
So, it’s impossible to say how much profit has been made, if any yet. But what we can say with a fairly high degree of confidence is the game has made its $40 million development budget back. With each copy selling for $70 (not accounting for the Eclipse version, which costs another $10) the official 1 million copies sold would have brough in about $70 million. Knock off 30% for platform cuts and we have roughly $49 million. Trim away a bit more for regional pricing, taxes, physical retail, and probably enough coffee to fuel a country and we are realistically looking at $35-50 million range for those first million copies sold. And keep in mind, it has probably sold quite a few more copies since then, too.
That’s seriously impressive when you contrast it against big triple-A titles, which these days regularly sit in the $150-300 million range for development, meaning they have to sell a shitload of copies to break even.
There is also a very fitting comparison to be made with The Witcher 3, considering Rebel Wolves is largely made up of former CD Projekt Red developers. Development of The Witcher 3 reportedly cost around $32 million in 2015, compared with the $40 million NetEase provided for The Blood of Dawnwalker. On paper, that makes Dawnwalker about $8 million more expensive, but inflation does its usual annoying thing to the numbers: $32 million in 2015 is equivalent to roughly $45 million today. In real terms, then, the two games had remarkably similar development budgets, with Dawnwalker potentially even costing slightly less.
No wonder they’re already working on a sequel to The Blood of Dawnwalker
