UPDATE 22ND SEPTEMBER: Former NetEase studio investor and Rebel Wolves board director Simon Zhu has revealed the “entire budget” of The Blood of Dawnwalker as $45m, and said that: “In Poland, that budget is AAA.”
In a post on LinkedIn, Zhu said: “In 2022, we funded the project in full at the outset – $45 million, the entire budget – so Konrad would never have to worry about money and could focus on getting the game finished and out. (The Fed was already signaling rate hikes. The party was about to end.) In Poland, that budget is AAA.”
Zhu’s post went on to praise the game’s success and highlight a few key reasons for it, such as games being “made by people”, the importance of clear leadership, and having people there to “strip away the distractions and solve the problems inside and outside game development” – people like Zhu, it sounds like.
What does Zhu know? Well, in their role as studio partner for NetEase they’ve worked on the boards of many game companies, including Quantic Dream, Thatgamecompany, Behaviour Interactive, Devolver, Kepler and more. But as of a year ago they’ve started their own thing: a funding group and game partner called GreaterThanGroup, which is – most notably – the partner for Casey Hudson’s hotly anticipated new Star Wars RPG Fate of the Old Republic.
ORIGINAL STORY 21ST SEPTEMBER: Polish developer Rebel Wolves has revealed the budget for dark fantasy vampire role-playing game The Blood of Dawnwalker, and it’s lower than expected, aligning it more closely with a double-A production than a triple-A blockbuster.
In an interview with Bloomberg, studio co-founder and game director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz revealed Dawnwalker’s budget as $40 million, which is a far cry from even the budget of a fairly linear blockbuster like 007 First Light, which reportedly cost $200m to make (though there were hefty licensing fees and high profile actors’ wages to pay in that case).
A more pertinent comparison, perhaps, is to CD Projekt Red’s The Witcher 3, which Tomaszkiewicz directed and which Dawnwalker is so alike. That game cost $80m to make, though a large chunk of that figure reportedly went on marketing. Still, Tomaszkiewicz has often talked about the two games’ productions being broadly equivalent in scope, which they don’t quite appear to be; and if you factor in that The Witcher 3 cost $80m more than a decade ago, the gap widens further still.
Despite a lower budget, Rebel Wolves – a studio 29 percent owned by Chinese behemoth Tencent – does show triple-A ambition in Dawnwalker, and occasionally realises it, though there is a pervading sense the visuals aren’t quite cutting edge and the world is sometimes stretched thin, becoming repetitive.
But what Dawnwalker lacks in that regard it makes up for in originality, with a bold take on RPG structure that does away with a main quest and leaves your adventure up to you, while limiting the time you have available for it. Dawnwalker is exactly the kind of risk-taking game former PlayStation boss Shawn Layden said our industry is in desperate need of, when he talked about bringing double-A games back.
I gave The Blood of Dawnwalker four stars in our review. “CD Projekt Red alumni create a familiar dark fantasy adventure,” I wrote, “but one with bold and provocative ideas of its own, that’s mostly, enormously successful.”
