Friday the 13th: The Game has undoubtedly been one of 2017's hot button topics, dividing gamers at the mere mention of its name. At the outset, the general consensus was the when everything was working as it should, the game was a ton of fun, the problem was that technical issues popped up more often than many would have liked. As a result, many a heated remark was made from one end of the spectrum to the other (just check out the comment thread on the official GameZone Review).
Despite everything, Friday the 13th: The Game has sold over 1.8 million copies according to publisher Gun Media in speaking with GI.biz. Gun Media boss and Friday the 13th co-creator Wes Keltner talked at length about the challenges the small team faced leading up to release and afterward, as well as how the team has reinvested the profits back into the game.
"We will be the first to admit that we weren't ready for the huge influx of players that hit us day one," Keltner said. "We looked at our player numbers from the beta, along with pre-orders and then added a 30% cushion. That's how we set up our servers and database for launch. We were soooo wrong. 100,000 players hit us in the first 20 minutes, and our servers melted," he continued.
It should be noted that Illfonic and Gun Media were going through some pretty standard procedures, and while it's easy for fans to get riled up in disbelief over how a developer fails to plan accordingly, that's much easier said than done.
Another thing to keep in mind about Friday the 13th: The Game is the budget that the development team had to work with. While Keltner doesn't give any exact figures, he describes it as "half the animation budget for AAA games."
Fortunately, the profits from the game accrued very quickly, and Gun Media has been able to reinvest a good portion of it back into the game to help iron out its remaining technical problems. Keltner said:
"Our number one priority right now is stability and squashing bugs. That's what all of our engineers are focusing on. We've also nearly doubled our team size to help with this issue. But our content/art teams are free to work on new content, and that's what we've been doing. Players can expect new maps, characters, Easter eggs and other great updates in the near future."
Friday the 13th: The Game is available now on Steam.
Source: [GI.biz]
