Despite technical issues, Lords of the Fallen had a strong launch commercially. And publisher CI Games has now disclosed the game’s total production and marketing costs.
CI Games CFO David Broderick shared the figures during a conference call on October 24, according to Bankier.pl. Total costs for Lords of the Fallen amounted to PLN 281 million ($66.6 million), of which:
- Development costs (excluding engine license fees) — PLN 178 million ($42.2 million);
- Marketing costs — PLN 81.5 million ($19.3 million);
- Production of physical copies — PLN 21.5 million ($5.1 million).
This is now the most expensive game in CI Games’ portfolio. Broderick added that marketing costs are not only related to Lords of the Fallen’s launch campaign, but also to the future development of the entire franchise and its brand recognition.
On October 23, CI Games also announced that Lords of the Fallen had surpassed 1 million copies sold in its first 10 days. This includes both physical and digital units. According to Broderick, consoles accounted for 54% of total sales.
For comparison, the original Lords of the Fallen hit 900k units sold in seven months since its release in October 2014.
Thanks to you, our fearless Lampbearers, the radiance of Mournstead rekindles…#LordsOfTheFallen pic.twitter.com/5YGt8UZ05b
— LORDS OF THE FALLEN (@lotfgame) October 23, 2023
Launched on October 13, Lords of the Fallen received generally favorable reviews from critics, with its Metascore ranging from 71 (PS5) to 75 (PC). On Steam, it currently holds a “Mixed” rating (only 59% of the nearly 13k reviews are positive), with many users citing poor performance, bugs, and other issues like corrupted save files.
However, CI Games is committed to fixing Lords of the Fallen, with president Marek Tymiński saying that the company is now listening to community feedback and working on further patches.
According to SteamDB, the game peaked at over 43k concurrent players, which is a solid result for a soulslike genre. For example, Lies of P, which also recently hit 1 million copies sold, had a peak CCU of 19.6k.
Unlike the original Lords of the Fallen, created by Deck13 and CI Games, the new game/reboot was developed by Hexworks. This is a studio that was established by CI Games in 2020 after raising €5.7 million from investors.
Founded in 2002, CI Games is an independent Polish developer and publisher best known for its Sniper: Ghost Warrior series. In 2007, it went public through an IPO on the Warsaw Stock Exchange.