Swedish developer and publisher Starbreeze suffered losses of $22.2 million in EBITDA in 2017.
The monetary losses of Starbreeze are associated with several reasons. One of them was the next postponement of the release of Overkill’s The Walking Dead shooter based on the famous zombie franchise.
The long-term construction game was announced in 2014 and the release date has already been shifted three times. According to Starbreeze, before the end of work on the title, the company needs to reserve $ 9.4 million. The release of the game is scheduled for the second half of 2018.
The head of Strabreeze, Bo Andersson-Klint, noted that before the release of Overkill’s The Walking Dead, the company is likely to continue to incur losses. At the same time, the company has high hopes for this release — it should become the largest in the history of Starbreeze.
The second failure of last year was the weak launch of the RAID: World War 2 cooperative shooter in the last quarter of 2017. Due to poor sales and low popularity of the title, Starbreeze as a publisher did not receive $2.5 million.
Along with losses, the company’s net sales in 2017 increased by 4.7% to $45.5 million.
The sales growth is mainly due to the multiplayer horror Dead by Daylight, whose revenues for the year increased by 40% to $ 25.4 million.
According to Andersson-Clint, “the stellar performance of Day by Daylight proved the advantages of the game-service model.”
At the same time, the revenues of the company’s other flagship, the Payday 2 criminal MMO shooter, decreased by 25% in 2017 and amounted to $15 million.
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