Control Resonant Is the Fastest-Selling Game in Remedy's History

Remedy has been making games a long time. None of them has ever sold like this.

The Finnish studio reported Tuesday that Control Resonant — the sequel to 2019's Control, launched worldwide on September 24 — passed one million copies sold on October 15, three weeks after release. That makes it the fastest-selling game in Remedy's history, ahead of everything with Alan Wake's name on it and everything with Max Payne's. The company said so itself, in the headline of its own quarterly report.

The money tells the same story as the sales. Revenue for July through September came in at €39.6 million, up 226 percent from €12.2 million in the same quarter last year — and most of that quarter only caught the game's first week, preorders included. Game sales and royalties brought in €35.3 million of it. A year ago Remedy posted a €16.4 million operating loss for this quarter. This year it posted a €0.6 million operating profit. One game did that.

The part that matters most for what Remedy does next is who bought it. Close to half of Resonant's players were new to Control entirely, according to the company's analytics — reaching new players was a stated goal, and the game hit it. The United States accounted for nearly half of all sales on both PC and console. Chinese-speaking regions and the UK followed on PC; Brazil cracked the top three in console units. A series that spent years as a cult favorite just had a mainstream launch.

Resonant also did this the hard way. It is the first game of this scale Remedy has published itself, on its own IP, without a big publisher's machine behind it — the studio carried the platform fees and the marketing bill directly, and that bill was the largest in its history. CEO Jean-Charles Gaudechon called the launch "a defining milestone for the company," which, given the numbers attached to it, reads less like executive decoration and more like bookkeeping.

Players backed the bet. The game holds a combined Metacritic score of 83, a user score of 8.8, a 91 percent positive rating on Steam and 4.7 out of 5 on PlayStation 5, and PlayStation players voted it the top new game of September in the store's Players' Choice poll. The original Control got a lift too — Remedy says the 2019 game sold better this quarter than in either of the two before it. Sequels that grow the audience usually do that. Sequels that shrink it do the opposite, and everybody in this business knows which kind is more common.

What it buys Remedy is running room. The Max Payne 1 and 2 remake, published by Rockstar Games, sits in full production. A new project is behind it. The studio's outlook for the full year — revenue and earnings up — stays unchanged, and Tuesday's report is the reason nobody had to revise it downward with an apology attached.

None of this was guaranteed. Control was admired more than it was bought, and a sequel that leans harder into action, puts Dylan Faden in the lead and tears Manhattan apart was a real swing. The swing connected. The fastest-selling game in Remedy's history is a weird one, published by the people who made it — and a million people showed up in three weeks to prove the model works.

The Games Desk's read: Remedy spent thirty years as the studio critics loved and the charts forgot. Resonant flipped that in three weeks — self-published, on its own IP, with the biggest marketing bet in company history. The weird game won without sanding down its edges. More from Previously's Games desk.