Outriders developer People Can Fly has claimed that they have yet to receive any royalties on their game from publisher Square Enix. As such, the team behind the game has no idea how many copies of the game have actually sold to this point.
The company was supposed to receive royalties for the game’s first quarter 45 days after the game’s initial release, on August 16. According to an investor’s note released on Tuesday, it would appear that the company had yet to receive those royalties. This has been suggested to mean that the game “did not break even” for Square Enix.
Executive Sebastian Wojciechowski, was quoted as saying through machine translation:
We don’t have any sales figures for Outriders. We estimate it at between two and three million units and assumed that this was a result that would ensure profitability for this project… the lack of payment by the publisher probably means that, according to Square Enix, it is not so.
Wojciechowski theorized on what actually happened with these sales figures. Things that might have affected the sale of the game range from Square Enix’s marketing for the title as well as the arrival of the game on Xbox Games Pass day one having caused the game to have fewer sales. Whatever did happen, it seems that People Can Fly is unclear about the sales figures for the game.
Wojciechowski continued:
Working with the publisher has many advantages, but also its disadvantages. One of them is the low impact of People Can Fly on sales activities and the incompleteness or—as in this case—the lack of data obtained from the publisher in this regard.
He concluded by stating that this lack of data is “one of the reasons” the company will most likely look to self publish in the future. That doesn’t mean that the studio will not be receiving royalties in the future with them hoping to still receive said royalties before the end of the year despite this information. Despite the actual sales numbers being kept need to know, Square Enix did reveal that in April it had 3.5 Million unique players.
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