Control 2's budget will be slightly smaller than Alan Wake 2
The CEO of Remedy shared the strategy for their next single-player game, Control 2. The studio is taking a different approach from most of the industry.
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The studio behind Alan Wake and Control, Remedy Entertainment, has shared a new detail about their next big single-player game. According to an interview with Stephen Totilo of Game File, the budget for Control 2 will be slightly less than the budget for Alan Wake 2. This is an unexpected turn for an independent studio with notable critical success over the last few years. A successful game will typically allow a studio to invest a bigger budget into the next game. Remedy’s CEO, Tero Virtala, explained that the iconic studio will take a different approach.
Control 2 will have a smaller budget than Alan Wake 2, according to Remedy CEO
Remedy released the original Control in 2019, and a few years later, they finally released a sequel, thirteen years in the making, Alan Wake 2 in 2023, which would go on to win multiple Game Awards despite competing with games like Baldur’s Gate 3 and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Alan Wake 2 brought the concept of the Remedy-verse to the forefront. The fictitious Federal Bureau of Control, where Control gets its name, appears in Alan Wake 2, including Control’s protagonist starring in an episode of the Night Springs DLC. Remedy's next game, also set in the Federal Bureau of Control, is coming out next month: FBC: Firebreak.
CEO Tero Virtala says in his interview with Game File that his goal is to educate game developers about the business side of making games. “We are showing them the company financials. We are discussing with them the project finances as well, so that they understand the wider context within which they operate and why budgets are now set into this level…” Virtala’s strategy is to avoid ballooning video game budgets, which have recently led to many layoffs, studio closures, and game cancellations. The budget for Control 2 is 50 million euros, and Virtala says that “if the team sticks to that budget and the game sells two million units, ‘we are at a break-even per game.’” If Remedy can create great games efficiently and on a smaller budget, they may not need to wait two years to start making a profit, like with Alan Wake 2.
Seeing such a creative studio rethinking how games are made is refreshing and exciting. The video game industry is in crisis. As console and hardware sales decline and huge games continue to underperform, something has to change. Not every video game needs to be bigger and more expensive. I hope that Remedy finds success with this strategy, and I hope other studios take note. I say all this without even considering the fact that Remedy is also making some of the most interesting games on the market these days. As someone who doesn’t particularly care for first-person shooter games, I’m still very excited for FBC: Firebreak next month, and I can’t wait to learn more about what this studio is creating.
