When I woke up and saw Sunset Overdrive trending, I was ecstatic with the presumption that Insomniac Games was probably doing a sequel for the game. However, when I did a brief search on why the October 28, 2014, release was trending, I was disappointed—almost horrified—by what I found.
I discovered that the reason why Sunset Overdrive was trending had something to do with the Insomniac hack by the Rhysida group who on Monday released over 1.7 terabytes of Insomniac data to their dark web portal, after the expiration of the deadline they had issued to the Spider-Man maker to pay an undisclosed ransom.
Documents released by the hackers include everything from the company’s roadmap to images taken from games under development as well as employee information. The malicious actors were likely infuriated by Insomniac’s refusal to pay the ransom.
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Since Rhysida made Insomniac’s company documents public, data scrappers have been sifting through the documents looking for any information of interest. One of the financial documents that has surfaced detailed the development cost and revenue Insomniac has made from all their previous games.
According to the financial documents, Insomniac only made $567 from Sunset Overdrive which felt a bit bizarre considering the positive reception of the game. On Metacritic, Sunset Overdrive raked in an average of 83 points on PC and 81 points on Xbox One.
Insomniac Games spent $42.6 million on the development of the Microsoft platform-exclusive game. While the game debuted at $60, it has now been discounted to $20. At the time of writing this post, you can get it for as low as $12 on Amazon. The financial document showed that 1,898,433 units of Sunset Overdrive were sold and generated $49,737,144.
Sunset Overdrive was developed by Insomniac Games and Blind Squirrel Games. At the end of the revenue share, Insomniac only made $567 from Sunset Overdrive’s entire lifecycle. Perhaps, this explains why Capcom president In August said that video games were too cheap.
Making video games is a risky investment and developers are pushing the prices higher to cover their development costs which has continued to balloon in recent years. Insomniac’s most successful game on the financial document was PS2 Ratchet Titles which earned the studio $67.4 million.
Sunset Overdrive may never get a sequel
Considering the poor financial performance of the first game, it is unlikely that Insomniac will try to make a sequel. Nevertheless, I enjoyed playing Sunset Overdrive a lot. The action-adventure third-person shooter was futuristic at that time because it was set in 2027 in a fictional metropolis called Sunset City.
It was a game that required quick reflexes and lots of jumping and sliding around. Things can get a little chaotic as you fight off the OD—a group of humans turned into mutants after drinking an energy drink beverage made by FizzCo.
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Sunset Overdrive was colorful—maybe overly so for some people. Also, sometimes there are too many activities on the screen that you’ll struggle to keep your sanity, especially when you have to protect the Overcharge Vats. Keeping the ODs away from the overcharged vats is a tough job. I died a lot on those missions—and it only gets tougher.
Although the development of Sunset Overdrive started in 2011, it was released in 2014 on Xbox while the Windows version came four years later. The lack of a compelling story and often repetitive quest designs were some of the areas where the game was harshly criticized.
Sunset Overdrive received several nominations and won a few. Notwithstanding the poor financial performance of the first release, I believe the game will perform remarkably better if it is rebooted for the current-gen consoles or if Insomniac decides to do a sequel.
