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Rebellion’s open world shooter Atomfall released in March among some stiff competition, landing in the same month as Hazelight’s cooperative hit Split Fiction and a week after the massively popular Assassin’s Creed Shadows. Yet according to CEO Jason Kingsley, this hasn’t stopped Atomfall from becoming a success in its own right. Indeed, Atomfall has done so well for Rebellion that Kingsley is considering making it into a series.
Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz, Kingsley was asked whether he thought he and Rebellion’s CTO Chris Kingsley had got the scale of its projects, including Atomfall, just right. “I don’t think we got it just right,” he responded. “I think that one of the things Chris and I want to do is repeat success. So we want to do more Sniper Elite, we want to do more Zombie Army, we want to do more Strange Brigade.”
To this, Kingsley added: “Now it looks like we want to do more Atomfall.”
Kingsley didn’t reveal specific sales figures for Atomfall, though we do know that it reached two million players as of mid-April. But he did say that it was a bigger success than Rebellion expected. “We’ve done a lot better than our mid-range estimates, actually,” he explained. “It’s nice when marketing comes back to you and says ‘yep, we underestimated our high-level success.”
According to Kingsley, a crucial part of Atomfall’s success was featuring it on Microsoft’s Game Pass service. This is partly due to increasing discoverability, and having Microsoft’s assistance. “They brought their skills and their scale to bear on our small project, and it’s done really, really well for them, so they got a good deal, we got a good deal out of it as well.”
However, it’s also because releasing on Game Pass provides some guarantee of a financial return. “Without going into details, they guarantee you a certain level of income, regardless of what it will sell for,” Kingsley added.
Yet while Atomfall performed above expectations for Rebellion, making a sequel remains a question of pragmatism rather than will. “Can we find the resources to do it? I don’t know. The idea has always been to have two thirds sequels and one third new IP pushing the boundaries.”
But pushing the boundaries is expensive, and Kingsley says any attempt to do so must fit with Rebellion’s approach to managing budgets and its position as a developer of midsize games. “We don’t deliberately fit into this mid range, but that’s what we can do, and what we can do successfully. We literally can’t afford to spend 200 million on making a game. We just don’t have 200 million.”
I’m pleased that Atomfall has been a success for Rebellion, but I will also admit to being slightly surprised. I played through the whole game last month and, although I had a reasonable time with it, my feelings largely chimed with Fraser’s review.
“Atomfall has needed to contend with the spectre of Fallout since it was first unveiled, but the similarities are only surface deep,” he wrote back in March. “That shallowness is probably Atomfall’s defining feature: it’s chock full of systems and obvious inspirations, but it rarely digs into them and struggles to find anything to set itself apart.”
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Kurt Indovina
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