We liked Jusant, Don't Nod's clamber-upper masterpiece, and we also liked Banishers, their colonial ghost-busting action-adventure, but it seems that not enough people did. The company have posted a profit warning, reflecting an 11% decline in operating revenue for the first half of 2024. They've also "paused" two unannounced games in development, and altered other unannounced games to be more appealing to a "wider audience".
Beyond that, they're considering "all possible options regarding our roadmap", which sounds just a touch ominous. "Despite an excellent critical reception, Jusant and Banishers: Ghosts Of New Eden unfortunately did not achieve the commercial results we had hoped for, resulting in a deterioration in our 2024 half-year results and leading us to consider all possible options regarding our roadmap," chairman and CEO Oskar Guilbert explains in a press release published yesterday. He adds that Ghost Of New Eden and Jusant "performed well below expectations".
They're expecting to make a loss for the first half of 2024 of around €1 million. To compensate for this, Don't Nod are writing down the assets of Jusant and Banishers: Ghost of New Eden (i.e.
lowering their value on company books, to match what the market says they're worth) and making some sweeping changes to their line-up of games in development. These include two unannounced in-house projects, codenamed P10 and P14, which are pencilled in for release before end of 2027. "In order to bolster sales potential and increase partnership opportunities with industry leaders, project design has been refocused to reach a wider audience, which involves scrapping certain developments (P10)", the press release notes.
It's not wholly clear from the wording whether this means that P10 has been entirely cancelled. They're also "temporarily pausing two projects in the design phase in Paris", codenamed P12 and P13, for a write-down of €7.6 million.
"This decision will enable us to prioritize resources and maximize the chances of success of the titles with the greatest potential at present," the press release adds. Don't Nod's big hope right now is Lost Records: Bloom & Rage from their Montreal team, which is being created by some of the people behind Life Is Strange. The press release hails the game's "particulary positive reception" from press - "I'm well up for this one," Alice0 (RPS in peace) wrote back in December 2023 - but adds that "at the same time, discussions are continuing with industry leaders to secure economic benefits".
Again, all rather open-ended. These in-house games sit alongside two unspecified external publishing projects that are due for release in 2025. The press release doesn't mention whether Don't Nod are revising their approach to these projects as well.
If you are thinking "this seems like a lot of things in dev for a team with (reportedly as of 2022) 320 people on the books across two studios", then congratulations, you share the opinion of the French video game union workers who expressed misgivings about Don't Nod's management in February . They painted the picture of a studio with "no long-term vision" for staff welfare, where deadlines change "frequently" and projects move in "contradictory" directions. While Jusant's fortunes are perhaps predictable, going by stereotypes about which games tend to be big hits, the underwhelming returns on Banishers are more worrisome.
Don't Nod had it vaguely pegged as a spiritual follow-up to Vampyr, which remains their biggest seller for all its middling reviews, as Don’t Nod’s head of creative Phillipe Moreau told me in December . Still, there's a difference between "game that is popular" and "game that sells what the company in question needs it to sell". As ever, best of luck to the rank-and-file developers caught up in these machinations.
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