Skydance Interactive’s The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners made over $29 million in revenue in its first year on-sale.
The game, which first hit PC VR on January 23, 2020, also released on PSVR and Oculus Quest over the course of the last year. Skydance says this figure accounts for sales across all platforms. Notably, though, the team pointed out that the game sold 10 times more on Quest than it did on Rift and Rift S. The Quest version launched just four months ago.
This is easily one of the largest revenue sums we’ve seen for a VR title, albeit over a long stretch of time. It’s difficult to find lifetime revenue stats for other games – we know that Superhot VR had sold over two million units as of May 2020 and made more than $2 million in revenue over the Christmas 2019 period, but haven’t seen updated figures since Quest 2 launch in October 2020. Many developers reported dramatically increased sales over that period.
The Walking Dead can no doubt attribute much of its success to the quality of its content, delivering a full, multi-hour single-player campaign with deep survival mechanics and an impressive physics system. We gave it 4/5 in our review, saying: “Despite its minor issues like relatively boring environments, repetitive mission structure, and human AI that leaves a bit to be desired, The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners is easily the best zombie game in VR to date.”
Not only that, but the game saw first-class ports to PSVR and Quest despite these systems being less powerful than many gaming PCs. Plus the game launched alongside Quest 2 itself.
Going forward, Skydance is set to deliver the game’s first free content update, The Trial, on Oculus Quest next month after the PC and PSVR launches last year. Given today’s numbers, though, it seems likely we’ll be hearing more from Skydance in the future.
