People Can Fly hasn't seen a royalty check from Square Enix for Outriders

The looter-shooter seemingly hasn't recouped its costs incurred by the publisher.

In a financial statement from the Polish developer People Can Fly, it was revealed that the company has yet to receive a royalty check from publisher Square Enix for its looter-shooter Outriders.

The royalties for the game would be set to be delivered to People Can Fly, when Outriders sales passed the pre-agreed terms relating to the costs of quality assurance, distribution, and marketing incurred by Square Enix. Essentially this means that People Can Fly will only be making royalties on the profit when Square makes up its investment, which it seemingly has yet to do.

The interesting part about this reveal is that the royalty check this is referring to would cover the second quarter of 2021, so between April 1 and June 30. As Outriders launched on April 1, this suggests that the game is yet to recoup its cost for Square since releasing.

At the same time, the previous player data that not only showed that Outriders occupied the top slot on Steam for the first two weeks after launch, and that Square intends to make Outriders its next big franchise after netting 3.5 million unique players, suggests that People Can Fly are also unsure as to what happened.

The developer has not called out the publisher on the matter however, but did publish a statement from People Can Fly's president Sebastian Wojciechowski as a follow-up to the report. After translation, here is what Wojciechowski had to say.

"We don't have any sales figures for Outriders - we estimate it at between 2 and 3 million units and assumed that this was a result that would ensure profitability for this project in the first quarter of sales. The lack of payment by the publisher probably means that, according to Square Enix, it is not so."

Wojciechowski continued further saying: "Perhaps it was caused by some elements of Square Enix's sales policy, the details of which we do not know, such as partnerships concluded by the publisher with distribution platforms or entities offering Outriders as an addition to their products. Failure to achieve the level of profitability may also mean that the costs incurred by the publisher are higher than expected. But I don't want to speculate; we will analyze the situation further. It is worth noting, however, that such explanations take time and our influence on the publisher's position is limited."

People Can Fly will continue to support Outriders as it previously promised, and at the same time is working on a few other codenamed projects, including Dagger for Take-Two Interactive, and Gemini for Square Enix, as well as another game that it intends to self-publish now.