Remedy's new CEO admits Alan Wake and Control didn't sell enough - and wants Hollywood to fix that

Remedy Entertainment has a reputation problem, and no, it's not about game quality. It's about units sold. According to Video Games Chronicle, new CEO Sakari Järvelä has come out swinging with some painfully honest commentary: Alan Wake and Control are critical darlings that simply didn't move enough copies, and that needs to change.

For those keeping score at home, this is the gaming equivalent of being the best player on the server and still finishing last in the tournament. Remedy keeps shipping prestige-tier, award-nominated titles that the gaming press absolutely loses its mind over - and then the sales numbers come in and everyone goes quiet.

Enter: the TV/movie pipeline

Järvelä's master plan to fix Remedy's commercial woes involves leveraging the studio's recently announced movie and TV deals to build the kind of mainstream brand awareness that converts curious bystanders into actual paying customers. The logic is pretty sound - more eyes on the IP means more people willing to actually drop money on the games.

It's the The Witcher Netflix school of thought: get someone hooked on the show, and suddenly they're buying the game. Whether it works out better for Remedy than it did for CD Projekt Red's relationship with Henry Cavill is another question entirely.

A critical darling that needs to become a commercial one

This is genuinely one of the more refreshing pieces of CEO-speak we've seen in a while - no corporate spin, no "we're thrilled with the reception," just a straight-up acknowledgment that the studio needs to level up its commercial game. Alan Wake 2 in particular launched to extraordinary reviews in 2023 and still struggled to break through to mainstream audiences in a meaningful way.

Remedy has essentially been stuck in a loop of high prestige, low profit - like farming for rare drops in a dungeon that doesn't drop enough gold to pay for the repairs. The talent is clearly there. The question is whether a Hollywood expansion pack is the buff this studio needs to finally hit the big numbers.

Considering how starved audiences are for actually good video game adaptations right now, betting on Remedy's atmospheric, narrative-heavy worlds to translate well to screen isn't the worst strategy. Alan Wake alone is basically already a TV show that happens to have controller inputs.