Control, a game created and owned by Remedy, was released by 505 Games on 27th of August 2019 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC. The game reached an average Metascore of 84/100 from game critics. Control also received over 60 awards and accolades during the annual game awards season, including several Game of the Year awards from the world’s leading gaming media outlets. Overall, Control is a major achievement that proves the capabilities of our team and technology. We have continued to develop Control with post-launch content, including the free Photo Mode and Expeditions updates released in October and December 2019. We still have a team working on two paid game expansions (downloadable content, or “DLC”) to be released in 2020.

Compared to many big-budget games released in 2019, Control hasn’t had as large marketing budget, which may have impacted early launch-period game sales. There are still a lot of potential gamers who have yet to discover Control, and we are gradually reaching them. This is facilitated by the awards and the proven quality of the game, continued positive word-of-mouth and the ongoing PR, marketing and sales activities of 505 Games and Remedy.

Control’s high quality, uniqueness and technical innovation provide opportunities to bring the game to new platforms. The post-launch sales have settled on a good level, and the game has maintained a relatively high average sales price. With Control, we have succeeded in creating a new game brand and a game that stands out. All of the above support Remedy’s future partner discussions for projects beyond Control, a game that is a great manifestation of what we can accomplish as a company.

Remedy has continued work on the second Crossfire project in good collaboration with Smilegate, the game’s owner and publisher. Smilegate announced at the E3 2019 conference that they are teaming up with Microsoft on CrossfireX, which will be the first Crossfire title ever to be released on a console platform. The game will include Remedy’s single player campaign when it launches on Xbox One in 2020. Remedy was included in the Crossfire presentation at X019, a major Xbox consumer event held in London in November.

Our third, as yet unannounced game project is proceeding well. The team working on our fourth project, Vanguard, has reached the stage of having the first internally playable development version of the game. The goal of Vanguard is to create a game that combines long-term service-based multiplayer experiences with some of Remedy’s unique game features. Both projects are preparing for pre-production. Overall, we have continued to systematically develop Remedy’s production competences, processes and ways of working. A special focus has been on extending our capabilities of distributed development, including wider external development projects, co-developments with partners and outsourcing specific parts of the project.

We continued to develop and utilize our proprietary Northlight game engine and game development tools with a team of 40 people. With the exception of Vanguard, all of our game projects are built on Northlight’s game engine. New technology and tools developed for Control were finalized, tested and polished – including AI, new animation technology that utilizes motion matching, various content creation tools, PlayStation 4 support and NVIDIA RTX ray tracing. The Northlight team has also started to develop systems and processes that enable game teams to add online functionality to future games. Our current focus is on back-end features required by the Vanguard project. There is also on-going work so that we are prepared for the next generation consoles arriving in 2020.