The CEO of the independent Canadian studio Red Barrels Philippe Morine (Phillippe Morine) spoke about the work on the horror series Outlast. According to him, one of the reasons for the success of the franchise was the distribution of the first part of the game through a premium PlayStation Plus subscription.
Morin noted that the creation of the first part of Outlast was not easy for him and his colleagues. The company has been looking for an investor for 18 months, and all this time its employees have been working without a salary.
Venture funds preferred to invest in mobile, and Philip Morin was repeatedly told that they would rather give $ 50 thousand to 10 mobile games than invest $ 500 thousand in Red Barrels.
Publishers were also not interested in an indie project in the unpopular horror genre – no one believed that the game would pay off.
As a result, Red Barrels were able to attract 1 million Canadian dollars from the Canada Media Fund and collect another 360 thousand from personal savings and loans. These funds became the budget of the first part of Outlast.
When the PC version of Outlast hit store shelves in September 2013, Red Barrel’s bank account was empty.
The money raised from the sales at Red Barrel was spent on developing DLC and porting the game to PlayStation 4.
The PS4 version of Outlast was ready by the beginning of 2014. Red Barrel decided to distribute it as a free title for PlayStation Plus premium subscription owners.
The company noted that they were not sure of the success of such a distribution model, but they wanted as many people as possible to find out about Outlast, because then Red Barrels did not have money for marketing promotion of the franchise.
The risky strategy paid off: streamers and video bloggers liked the game.
The project became known, and this allowed a 5-fold increase in the budget of the sequel compared to part 1. 7 million Canadian dollars were raised for the development of Outlast 2.
Outlast 2 was released at the end of April 2017. Sales of the second part provided Red Barrel with record revenues for the year in the company’s history.
To date, the Outlast franchise has sold 15 million game copies and earned $ 64 million — an outstanding result for a project of independent developers.
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