Ninja Theory launches final development diary for Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice

It has been three months since the launch of Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice and now developer Ninja Theory has released their final development diary in their 30 video series.

In the video the developers talk about some of the key numbers from Hellblade’s launch:

• Over 75k pre-orders across PC and PS4 before launch.
• 250K units sold in the first week at $29.99.
• Over $13m in revenue generated in 3 months.
• 500k units sold in 3 months, which puts the project beyond breakeven and into profit. Our prediction was to be at this point in 6 months from release.
• Development took 3 years and with an average team size of 20.
  
• Game sold as digital-only.

Some words from Tameem Antoniades, Co-founder and Chief Creative Ninja, on the success of Hellblade:

“The escalating stakes in the AAA retail publishing model has killed off countless independent studios like us, many smaller publishers, and is now straining even the largest of publishers. This isn’t survival of the fittest but a routing of the creative base upon which this industry was built.
The future isn’t written and we don’t believe that the writing is on the wall.  AAA will always exist but we need strong alternatives as well.
Three years ago we announced our intention to find a way to do our best work outside of the AAA retail model and have openly documented the journey in our thirty development diaries.
The final step is to share our commercial model and digital sales data for the benefit of other developers.  The more data we have for alternative business models, the more developers can take informed commercial and creative risks.  For the benefit of our beloved medium, we’d like to encourage other developers to share their own data as well wherever possible.
Thank you to everyone who has supported us and made Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice a commercial and creative success.”

Check out our review of Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice.