Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice Sells Over 500k Units in Just Three Months

Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice was released earlier this year on the PS4 and PC and received a great response from both gamers and critics for its intense story, world building, and its portrayal of a character with a severe mental illness.

Despite looking like a Triple A game, Hellblade was actually an indie game developed by Ninja Theory and only had around 20 people working on it. Today, Ninja Theory has released the stats so far of the game since it was released three months ago, and they’re very impressive.

-  Over 75K pre-orders across PC and PS4 before launch.
-  250K units sold in the first week at $29.99.
-  Over $13m in revenue generated in 3 months.
-  500k units sold in 3 months, which puts the project beyond breakeven and into profit.                             The prediction was to be at this point in 6 months from release.
-  Development took 3 years and with an average team size of 20.
-  Game sold as digital-only.
-  About half the sales were on PC.

In a press release, via WCCFTech, Ninja Theory’s Co-founder and Chief Creative Ninja, Tameem Antoniades said: “The escalating stakes in the AAA retail publishing model has killed off countless independent studios like us, many smaller publishers, and is now straining even the largest of publishers. This isn’t survival of the fittest but a routing of the creative base upon which this industry was built.

“The future isn’t written and we don’t believe that the writing is on the wall. AAA will always exist but we need strong alternatives as well.

“Three years ago we announced our intention to find a way to do our best work outside of the AAA retail model and have openly documented the journey in our thirty development diaries.

“The final step is to share our commercial model and digital sales data for the benefit of other developers. The more data we have for alternative business models, the more developers can take informed commercial and creative risks. For the benefit of our beloved medium, we’d like to encourage other developers to share their own data as well wherever possible.

“Thank you to everyone who has supported us and made Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice a commercial and creative success.”