Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden and Jusant are failures. DON’T NOD itself, the software house that created them, admitted it and spoke about sales below expectations in its latest financial report, covering the first half of 2024. It’s a shame, because they’re both great games.
Oskar Guilbert, Chairman and CEO of the company, said: “We are obviously disappointed by our recent performance in an extremely competitive and selective market. Despite a great critical receptionJusant and Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden unfortunately did not achieve the commercial results we had hoped for, causing a deterioration in our first half 2024 results and pushing us to consider all possible options regarding our roadmap.”
A difficult future
For the first half of 2024, DON’T NOD recorded a 11% drop in operating revenuesfor 14.6 million euros, compared to 16.5 million euros in the first half of 2023.
The key figures for the period are: the increase in catalog sales (€1.2 million), driven by Vampyr and Life is Strange; the below-expected sales of Jusant (released at the end of October 2024) and Banishers: Ghosts of new Eden (released in mid-February 2024); the decline in development revenues (-€2.0 million), following the completion of Banishers: Ghosts of new Eden; a reduction in capitalized production (-€1.1 million), resulting from the temporary suspension of 2 production lines.
Operating revenues will not cover operating expenses (excluding depreciation, amortization and provisions), which means that the operating EBITDA will be in loss (of approximately -1.0 million euros).
To recover, DON’T NOD is thinking of devaluing the assets of the two failures to focus on a new intellectual property in development, which offers a greater potential for returns in the short and medium term. Incidentally, we are talking about Lost Records: Bloom & Rage, the first game developed by the Montreal studio together with the authors of Life is Strange, which was received very positively by the press at Gamescom 2024.
In addition, there are two other internal projects, codenamed P10 and P14, scheduled for release by the end of 2027, which have not yet been announced, and there are third-party projects that should guarantee good revenues (they are scheduled for release by the end of 2025).
At the same time two games will be suspended being designed in Paris, codenamed P12 and P13, to give more support to titles with the greatest potential.
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