Remedy Entertainment, the developer behind Max Payne, Alan Wake and Control, has presented new financial figures that contain some exciting details. This is primarily about the combination project Max Payne 1 and 2, which is being created as a remake.
High development budget for the remakes
The figures now published by the Finnish developer contain some interesting references to the remakes of Max Payne 1 (original release in 2001) and Max Payne 2 (release in 2003). In October 2023, Remedy had already announced that the remakes of Max Payne 1 and 2 were “ready for production”. We are still in this phase, but have made “significant” progress over the course of the year. Remedy sees Max Payne 1&2 Remake as “a significant new game with great potential.” This strengthens the evidence that the player will get both titles at once – and will most likely receive a “full price product”.
The basis for the optimistic assessment of the remake project is that Remedy has planned a similar development budget to Alan Wake 2. There are no official figures, but the consensus so far is that around 50 million euros were invested in the development of the last Remedy game. A good 20 million euros are said to have been spent on marketing. Since, according to Remedy, Alan Wake 2 recouped a “significant portion” of Epic Games' investments and cost 50 euros when released, the rumored 50 million euro production costs fit relatively well with the published figures. As of early February, Remedy had sold 1.3 million units.
What's exciting is that Remedy isn't investing any of its own money in the developers of the Max Paynes remakes for the time being. The project will be “fully” financed by the rights holder Rockstar Games. In the first half of 2024, all current projects such as Condor, Control 2 and Max Payne 1&2 Remake should advance to the next stages of development. Two DLCs are being released for Alan Wake 2. How Remedy will make changes to the gameplay of the Max Payne remakes in order to bring the games “to modern standards and unite them into a whole” is not yet clear.
When the remake projects were announced in April 2022, the Remedy website temporarily collapsed due to too much traffic. PCGH readers have recently expressed great interest in Max Payne. In the annual survey of which games are particularly high on the wish list, both games landed in second and third place behind Stalker 2 with a high level of interest. After all, a little more than 30 percent of the survey participants were interested in the remakes.
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