The developers of Dispatch have said the game is on course to beat the internal sales targets it has for the three-year mark… in about three months.
The superhero comedy released its final episodes last week, and the game has generated buzz for the adventure akin to when Telltale games began gaining popularity. And given that developer AdHoc Studio was formed by devs responsible for Telltale's best – namely, The Walking Dead Season 1, Tales of the Borderlands, and best of all, The Wolf Among Us – that's not a major surprise. The developers announced on November 3 that the game had sold over 1 million copies in its first ten days (and about halfway through the season), which in turn made the idea of Season 2 a big possibility.
Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz, Dispatch executive producer Michael Choung talked about the game's original predictions, and while the studio wouldn't share the exact numbers, it was revealed that the team had a "bull case" figure they had anticipated hitting for the game's three-year mark.
"We're on track to do that in three months," Choung said, adding, "So the bull case in three months... We were confident that people would like it. I think the degree to which it would be successful is something that I certainly didn't anticipate."
And while most game releases will drop off after release, where the first weekend of release will be the biggest player count it will see, the same can't be said of Dispatch and its episodic format. According to SteamDB, the game experienced three spikes – each larger than the last – with each episode drop, culminating in last week's peak of 220,060 players.
However, Choung explained that the idea of an episodic release was subject to some internal debate: "Like, should we do it this way? Should we release it all at once? Conventional wisdom told us we absolutely shouldn't have done what we've done... I think it's absolutely proven itself."
