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Alan Wake 2, last year’s best horror game, best game overall or best-game-featuring-an-unexpected-but-extremely-welcome-musical-dance-number depending on who you ask, has shifted over a million copies. Musical dance numbers don’t come cheap, though, so it’s still yet to turn a profit – despite outpacing the momentum of any of Remedy’s previous games, including Control.
This all comes direct from Remedy’s own mouths, as the developers announced that Alan Wake 2 had shifted over a million copies by the end of 2023 – having released in the middle of October – and has popped an extra digit on the end of that during January, upping the number to 1.3m by the start of February 2024.
That’s a bunch of numbers to parse, and not all that interesting in isolation. What puts Alan Wake II’s momentum in perspective is its pace against previous Remedy hits. The sequel has so far shifted over 50% more copies in total than Control did in twice the time – four months. Notably, that adds up to triple the number of digital sales of Control – which is likely to be closer to the story on PC, given that physical games are only really a thing for consoles nowadays (although not for Alan Wake: The Second, which went digital-only on every platform). Control, for what it’s worth, has sold over four million copies since 2019, putting Alan Wake: Number Two’s total at over a quarter of that in just two months and making it Remedy’s fastest-selling game to date.
“Fastest-selling game evs” is nice and all, and one million is a pleasing round number, but it doesn’t mean that Remedy have made their money back on 2 Alan 2 Wake just yet. CEO Tero Virtala said that the game has “recouped a significant part of the development and marketing expenses”, indicating that there’s still a distance to go before Sam Lake’s choreography lessons are covered by its cheques.
Of course, there are two bits of paid DLC to come that will help: Night Springs, a meta journey through episodes of the in-universe TV show of the same name as familiar faces from the Wakeverse, and The Lake House, which hints at another crossover with Control’s FBC in its tease of something involving “an independent government organisation”. The former will be with us in late spring, while The Lake House is yet to be given even a rough release window – possibly due to a connection to Control 2, we’d speculate.
Remedy expect 2l2n W2ke to have “excellent long tail sales”, at least, with plans to develop some updates to follow their addition of a New Game+ mode and smaller tweaks. They also mention plans for “other activities” for the community, which is just vague enough to be possibly intriguing or potentially less exciting than it seems. Given the audacity of aIIan wake itself, it’s hard to imagine Remedy going any less than totally ham, though.
With Alan Wake: Episode II (yes, I know there’s American Nightmare, just go with me on this) now out the door, Remedy confirmed that its development team have shifted over to speed up the work on their other upcoming projects, including Control 2, the Max Payne remakes and the multiplayer Control spin-off currently codenamed Condor, which should all “reach their next development stages” – whatever that means – in the first half of 2024 according to Virtala.
With Control and Alan Wake now connected lore-wise and clearly doing pretty well for Remedy, the studio unsurprisingly has plans for more beyond Control 2 and Alan Wake 2: Wake Harder, expressing that expanding both series “will be a key part of our future”.