Also, didn’t you know that Will Smith stars in a zombie game for mobile and PC, developed by the Chinese company Tencent? Relax, you’re probably not the only one. The title hasn’t attracted much attention from either players or critics, and now the developers have come out and told Reuters what a huge flop Undawn is, eight months after its launch.
The title, which had a budget of around $140 million – roughly double that of, say, Sucker Punch’s massive samurai adventure Ghost of Tsushima – has only grossed a fraction of that. More precisely, it is estimated to have grossed $287,000, just 0.2% (!) of the total budget. The player peak was reached shortly after launch with just over 8.5 thousand concurrent players on Steam, but then fell sharply and now averages around 900 per month.
In its latest quarterly report, Tencent’s strategy director James Mitchell told investors that, largely due to the disastrous outcome of Undawn, it will now focus its game development on more well-known series, simpler party titles and Genshin Impact-like anime RPGs instead.
Tencent’s director of strategy James Mitchell:
We focus on fewer games with bigger budgets, […] Typically, we want to bet the most on games that are either a repeat of a successful IP… or games that are a repeat of a proven game success within a niche and take them to a mass market.”
