The Callisto Protocol, developed by Striking Distance Studios, has reportedly failed to meet sales expectations, a state of affairs which has affected the share price of publisher and parent company Krafton as a result.
According to Korean website MK-Odyssey, The Callisto Protocol cost around 200 billion won ($162m / £132m) to develop over the course of three years, a figure which sales have failed to recoup.
During development, Krafton claimed that The Callisto Protocol would be a "AAAA" developed title, implying a level of quality beyond the more boilerplate and bog-standard AAA budget.
Samsung Securities, along with other financial investment and securities companies, have lowered their target stock price in response, noting that The Callisto Protocol's sales were softer than anticipated. In a stock report released earlier in the month, the firm noted that they "expected cumulative sales of 5 million copies, but considering the current sales ranking, cumulative sales of 2 million copies will not be easy until this year”.
Krafton apparently intends to ameliorate some of these losses by supporting the title with cosmetic and story-based DLC, but it remains to be seen whether that will be enough. We ran a poll back at the start of December (with a fairly substantial sample size, mind you), which suggested that might be something of an uphill battle, as even around the time of launch, players were fairly shy about picking up the game.
We enjoyed The Callisto Protocol's weighty combat and brutal animations but thought the experience was let down in part by boring characters and some framerate issues. For our full thoughts on the matter, check out our in-depth review.
Did you pick up the Callisto Protocol? Are you surprised that sales seem soft, or was it that the publisher's expectations were too high? Let us know in the comments section below.
[source m.k-odyssey.com, via videogameschronicle.com]
Comments 73
This number is insane, the Witcher 3 and numerous other great games cost way less than this. And this game is an 8 hour linear game!!
Expecting a new IP to sell 5 million copies Is ridiculous by any company's standards.
On a side note, I thought Striking distance was an independent studio, so I learned something new!
Yeah if those figures are correct the publisher really missed the mark.
Plus it's only been out one month. They need to keep drumming up hype and making sure people buy it over time. Especially given global inflation right now
I wonder if anyone knows on average how much of a games lifetime sales happen in the first month though?
Surprised that PS thought the Combat was the positive. In everything I have seen and heard the single biggest universally noted flaw in the game is the combat (and the single biggest workaround to make it a decent game is to largely ignore the baton and stick with the hand cannon the gravity glove).
I don't know how they expected 5 mil from a Horror game and new IP. As someone else said it, I don't think even Dead Space hit those numbers.
@Kidfried
And it is a survial-horror game which probably automatically turns of most people
If I were to wear a tinfoil hat, I'd say that, from what I read, they had intended for this game to fail to collect insurance money lol
That is so, so, SO, unrealistic to expect a new IP to hit those numbers, let alone a game in a niche genre like survival horror.
That is LAUGHABLE.
They deserve it for being incredibly misleading with the trailers
The question no one is asking - why is everyone in the game constantly so sweaty? Come on lads, grab a towel.
In all honesty, I actually ended up quite liking the game, but only once I had lowered the difficulty down to easy. The combat is far too frustrating and the game isn't good enough for me to bother persevere at the higher difficulty
I guess they were placing all their bets on it picking up the Dead Space baton. DS2 did well selling 2 million in the first week and went on to sell over 4 million copies so I suppose they were hedging their bets they could top that. Still seems hell of a gamble, going on the devotion given to an older title. People are fickle and, with the way games have been hyped then released as a shambles recently, the majority want to see good reviews first.
AAAA? AA production for the first half and AA production for the last half?
@SamMR
I imagine that budget factors into the DLC as well but even still.
@SamMR and those great games have been out for years already, hence the price cut, youre comparing then to a 2022 brand-new release.
I like CP. if you are looking for something that won’t consume 100’s hours, have you spend most of that time managing crafting items, like the original Resident Evil you will find something to like. One of tue few games that runs okay in Quality Mode at 30fps that I can play. Cannot help feel that some of the DLC content should have been part of the main game.
I couldn’t even finish it. The game just wasn’t fun to play. And I was rooting for it too. The DeadSpace comparisons didn’t help - this game is nowhere near the same league as DeadSpace. It’s like comparing Sharknado 5 to Jaws.
Most people probably decided to just wait for the Dead Space remake.
It might be an AAAA budget title, but it is in no way an AAAA published product. Very rough and buggy, if they invested as much they should have seen it through and finished the damn thing before release day.
@Nightcrawler71 This is my guess as well.
A great part of the cost is for hiring hollywood actors. This is a waste of money and a big mistake (there are a number of talented voice actors that cost a fraction of what they expended); not every developer can be Kojima. Developers must focus in the lore, gameplay and in polishing the experience instead of including celebs in games for its promotion.
Seems like expectations got way too high for this.
It's an OK game but lacks a truly compelling story, the characters are boring and the gameplay is pretty uninteresting too
Appreciate that game development is difficult but surely they were aware they had a dud here?
This is what happens when publishers talk nonsense, AAAA is nothing but marketing BS that means literally nothing.
As for the sales, expecting 5 million sales for a new IP who's big selling point was being a copy of Dead Space. A game that's getting a remake just a few months later and itself never sold in big numbers. So I'd suggest their expectations were make believe as much as anything
Loved the game! Plat on PS5 and PS4 without save transfer, because the update took that opportunity away.
Oh stop ya still made money just like james Cameron. Oh avatar 2 made 1 billion oh we want 2 billion lol be greatful you got money lol
I want sequel
As is usually the case, the publisher here expected way too much from a brand new IP, and it doesn't help that the game had mild reception.
From a purely self-centered standpoint this is nice, because it means I'll get to buy it for very cheap soon enough.
Dont make AAAA a thing please XD Triple A is already enough
@Nightcrawler71
This is true. It ended up having disappointing reviews, so I'm gonna get it on sale, but it's still a shame.
It's an amazing genre that needs its AAA games and all this is gonna do is make it even scarier for publishers to fund these types of games
No, I ended up not picking up Callisto Protocol despite me being hyped for it in the first place. I'm quite glad that I changed my view after hearing negative things about it. Also, wasn't really too surprised that the game failed to meet sales expectations.
Still so confused about PushSquare saying the combat was one of the good things. It was the absolute worst part of the game and was the one thing that really completely ruined it for me besides all the other glaring issues of course.
@DarkTron I'm comparing the scope for these games compared to this linear 8 hour experience. You have games with huge world maps good story and combat not costing nearly as much as this game did. Especially since it's a niche game aimed towards survival horror fans
Man, Naughty Dog and Sony Santa Monica are only AAA developers. They gotta catch up!!!
@BoldAndBrash This game is a unique situation, you have the constant comparison to Dead Space, the average reviews, the huge marketing campaign, the unbalanced combat, they honestly did it to themselves. Games like the Evil Within were way better than this in regards to story and gameplay and it cost a fraction of this. The only thing this game excel at is the amazing graphics and animations, the rest is just average.
That's what you get when you build up your clients expectations much more than your product will actually deliver...
Only 8 hours for a linear game, that offers almost no replayability, and has a premium price of 70$ on PS5 and 60 Euros on PC.
And it had a lot of stuttering problems on PC at launch, making the game practically unplayable on that platform until they patched it a few weeks later.
And it's a horror shooter game, not exactly pointed at the general masses.
That they've set too high expectations for it, is no one's fault but their own.
For myself I'll rather play the Dead Space Remake - it's a much more compelling idea.
I'll get Callysto much later at a proper hefty discount... or free as a monthly PS+ game.
Those are absolutely insane expectations for a new IP. What were they thinking?
They projected to ship FIVE MILLION units? Even Metroid Dread – a universally acclaimed title from an established and beloved IP – only sold 2.9m copies! Absolutely insane expectations.
5 million is insane expectations for a new ip - particularly in the survival horror genre.
I dont doubt sales were affected by the misinformation spread prior to the games release though, as well as the announcements around things like paid death animations.
Performance issues at launch mustn't have helped either.
Wonder if sales expectations were set around this originally being part of the PUBG universe
@SamMR The only possible explanation I can think of is that it includes marketing costs?
@Rob_230 I can easily imagine some dumb exec thinking that setting something in the same universe as another thing somehow guarantees sales equal to that other thing.
@SamMR is there a website that accurately estimates VG budgets? I'd genuinely find that interesting
5mil is not unrealistic. new studio or not.
the makershad proven pedigree in horror. 90% gamers dont know who released what anyway.
the issue? its a 6/10 game, that has ongoing issues.
released as finished, no talk of the stupid dlc, reviews at 9/10.
would achieve 5mil
@Kidfried Well said. That last is the real kicker No Dead Space game ever sold that amount and that was in the heyday of shorter single player adventures. Whoever suggested 5 million was way off the mark.
Even if, against the odds for a new studio etc, the game had actually been really good it likely would have struggled to get 5 million at best possible projections.
Madness. From the same school as Square Enix's sales forecasting department.
I mean, honestly, if they wanted such a big launch, they should’ve chose a different style game that was perhaps just a little bit more family friendly than a gore circus. Just saying that, if you advertise, “You’ll die so many ways, so many disgusting and brutally visceral ways,” you’re getting a very niche demographic excited and pushing away a very much larger demographic.
This sounds very similar to how EA overestimated the sales of Dead Space 3 at launch. I think they estimated 5 millions as well.
I'll generally agree that 5m copies seems high for a new IP, unproven developer and a somewhat niche genre - unless you're Resident Evil. But the other thing is it came out in December, they didn't even get it out early enough in the holiday shopping season to give it a chance for truly big numbers.
I also don't think the game looked good. It never looked appealing to me, and I loved Dead Space! It looked dark, angry and stupid. It never made a compelling case for itself. And it absolutely looked like the inferior game compared to the forthcoming Dead Space remake.
Which also begs the question: what do we figure EA's projections for new Dead Space are? Will it meet them?
this game was a positive surprise for me really. I really liked the atmosphere and gameplay. Game looks absolutely good and I think combat is fine if you get use to it. At least I enjoyed it. I played it through 3 times already on normal and easy. I'm doing the hard mode at the moment which is very tough
Also I recommend to play it with 3d pulse headset or other good quality headset, it's amazing!
AAAA? This barely reached AA for me. Yeah, it had some nifty visuals and production values but jeez, the rest was such a jumbled, lazy mess. Way too linear, way too much crawling through vents or squeezing through gaps, way too many cheap jump scares, potentially enjoyable but ultimately misjudged and clunky melee combat, that godawful dodging that threw the camera all over the shop, the overused, generic enemy types, the audio logs you had to listen to via a bloody menu, instantly forgettable characters, a tired, lazy plot with an infuriatingly cheap ending, a final boss that was an insult to pretty much all final bosses …. yeah, it wasn’t hideous and I plodded through to the Platinum but it just felt like a great idea that was put aside, discovered some time later, twiddled with, possibly abandoned but then rescued and rushed out without bothering to add anything remotely innovative, creative and fun to the whole affair.
Meanwhile, the sleeper hit that was Evil West sadly didn’t get as much focus but beat The Callisto Protocol hands down in every conceivable way and provided hours of unadulterated old school mayhem!
This is an absurd budget for this game. It reminds me a lot of Kingdoms of Amular and that whole debacle. This will likely tank striking distance in the long term. It's also important to see the light that this sheds on the whole idea of new upstart Studios being compared to Indie studios. As you can see they are far different things a lot of times some perhaps not always deserving Talent is associated with people that leave other larger Studios and eventually form other Studios and because of that murky reputation they get enough investment backing from Big major players and even outside corporations to make these games thinking it's a surefire profitable investment..... and here we are. It didn't work out too well for them and if you think about it, many other studious overselling what they can deliver to investors and to the public, and thus losing good faith from both.
160 million for a linear 10 hour game with a narrow scope and very small cast of characters is nuts. I have a feeling a Lotta that cash ended up funding "company" trips and meals for Schofield and Co.... Alongside the marketing paid for to be highlighted endlessly on these sites and the game awards.
I'd love to see this publisher team up with that moaning guy that made Days Gone now. Capture lightning in a bottle and go all out for a AAAAA experience, with pre and post release circuses combined.
This is where Game Pass and PS+ money could help them out some, but at $70 dollars and a new IP, this one just didn’t stand a chance at 5 million sales. Throw in the fact it didn’t review all that great.
Yeah, that’s crazy. Very unrealistic. I bought and really enjoyed it, but this was too much to expect. And I didn’t get a “AAAA” feeling from it. I would love to see a sequel, but I don’t know if that will happen looking at this. DLC is still a maybe for me.
I also enjoyed combat doing something new despite the occasional frustration.
@SamMR You could say that about any game at launch, including the Witcher 3. That argument makes no sense. If that was the way things worked, no game would succeed until massive price drops.
@carlos82 Yeah, I’m not sure why it would sell so much more than Dead Space. It’s really kinda crazy. And I quite enjoyed the game and want a sequel too.
Literally finished this Saturday afternoon. The game is an interesting one to review. Graphically it is stunning but graphics dont make a game.
I thought the storyline and characters were ok - i like the Resident Evil games so survival horror is a good genre but it is an 18 rated game (?) and a new IP so expecting this to achieve Resident evil numbers (which they dont always hit) was a big ask.
The combat is the most frustrating thing about this game! And is a major factor of a game and my god it frustrated me to the point of insanity!
Eventually i settled on a stealth / reduce the numbers of enemies using the environment and the glove or even throwing them out of the area to complete certain sections.
The designers should have focused on either guns or melee! I upgraded the baton and a few of the guns, felt as though it made zero difference!
The bosses were repetitive and had no link to the protagonist, until we got to the final boss! Shouldn't we have had the head guard follow us and mutate throughout the game Ala nemesis in Resident Evil 3?
4A game... heh... okay. With 2023 looooooong list of releases they should expect people are going to save every penny and precisely choose what they buy. 2M buys is great result for Dead Space copy (while remaster around the corner) and horror games are also for narrow group of people.
I liked the game, but it was nothing amazing. The combat was generally quite fun; mobs were a pain though, and like most reviewers said, showed the cracks in the combat system. Worst part for me was the terrible level design. Endless boring corridors, constant climbing through vents and walls. No interesting environments to speak of. Doesn’t make me want to replay the game in any way…
No DLC for me until it’s deeply discounted, if I buy it at all…
I am SO READY for Dead Space
Somewhere in the depths of Square-Enix, Yosuke Matsuda is reading this thinking "we should buy these Krafton guys, they know what's up!"
@Green-Bandit $70 new IP from an unknown studio and publisher in a niche genre where it's more mainstream predecessor never sold numbers near that expectation.
At some point a sales prediction is less prediction and more making numbers up to get money.
What a shame. It looked so cool too.
Despite the hatred, this was the best selling game of the Holiday season... what does it mean?, the gaming industry is in recession. Why they do not publish the sales number and making costs of Midnight Suns or any other games?. I love Midnight Suns but it did fall short in selling. With brand new games at $60-$80 price tag, people are buying less, given the fact that 99% needs some patching such as Horizon Forbidden West, etc... perhaps they should lower the prices and deliver full functional games
@Jaz007 OMG!! now I see why people misunderstood my comment XD
I actually meant costs as in budgets not the games price.
The main problem with this game was the same as a modern performer singing a Whitney Houston song. You were always going to be compared to the original with the equivalent of a remastered vinyl well on the way. They could have done a lot to make sure this IP was not just a blatant rip-off, but chose not to.
@NEStalgia agreed 100%, not sure what they were thinking, maybe wishful thinking? But this is the issue with AAA gaming, it is expensive and a risk, throw in the time they take to make and it’s not hard to see why the industry is having selling spree’s and trying to follow the money. As big as EA, battlefield can only afford one more bad outing and that could be shelved. Thats why we get so many remakes, reboots and sequels, safe money, or shall i say safer money. I want to play and support new IP’s as much as i can, but this was never getting $70 out of my wallet. Especially since i am a digital gamer and can’t resell it.
I enjoyed it and finished it - but it was a GameFly rental
I would buy Story DLC if it came out. Game does end in a cliffhanger I would like to continue.
@Green-Bandit Even the selling sprees have bad ends. AAA keeps selling because they can't afford to keep putting all that money into all these projects that take a decade to turn a profit and if they fail the last decade is in the red. But selling to a big sugar daddy doesn't actually fix that. If anything it mostly closes shop and consolidates only the single most profitable parts into factories. It's a bailout for investors that's better than liquidation, but it's really just a cousin of it.
I mean the game looks great and I want it but also…. Money. I seldom buy brand new games for this reason and I haven’t mainly because of the increase from 60-70-80. It’s too much of a risk anymore.
How does a no-name studio have $160 million to spend on making a game? Why, before worrying about building something "AAAA" quality, did they not make sure the concept of the game was really good? I wasn't particularly interested because it just seemed like another generic shooter. Then the reviews seemed weak so. Idiots; I trust they've learned their lessons.
I actually really liked the game but that budget and those sales projections are insane.
The combat system feels good until the later stages of the game, where multiple enemies and close camera angle combine to cause a nuisance.
Those sales targets are optimistic, especially with TLOU Dead Space and RE4 remakes due.
Don't know if its only here in Brazil, but this is one of the most expensive games to buy here. The price target has not been properly adjusted for the my region, and games are already quite expensive here. Guess that this is something that contributes for less sales too.
Even Sony won't call their firstparty games AAAA and i think its a nonsense claim. Good/firstparty /platform exclusive triple A games look gorgeous already. And you don't even come close to the amount of polish in there
considering how divisive the reviews are and the fact this game disappointed so many people with its terrible combat system and repetive nature, count your blessings you even manage 2-3m copies in sales. it came out at a great time, when there were no big releases. many people got swindled due to the strong marketing campaign but unfortunately that is all this game had going for it.
what even is a AAAA game?
Its almost laughable reading through comments and gamers questioning a corporation's financial forecast. I'm pretty sure they expected 5M units based on how much they spent developing this game. Sure, let's just make a $200B game and hope it ships 500,000 units. Consumers & spectators, please stay in your lane LMAO. Everyone wants high end graphics, but it comes at a cost and risk, and this happened to be a bust. Its no surprise why low risk indie games are on the rise.
They're super crazy to think the game was ever going to perform that well. And this is coming from someone who originally planned to buy the game at full price.
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