Evil Dead: The Game sells 500,000 units in under a week – perfect timing for Embracer Group
Worried about Embracer Group's stewardship of classic Square Enix IP? The publisher's latest success suggests you shouldn't be.
Evil Dead: The Game may have had something of a quiet launch as far as marketing and buzz go, but the game has already been a success; per a new tweet about the owner of the game IP, Embracer Group, the game has sold through 500,000 units in just five days.
It helps, of course, that the game is multiplatform and cross-play – being an asymmetric multiplayer title, the deck would be stacked against you if you were limiting your player pool to just one platform, right? So these sales count for every version of the game sold since its fitting release date of Friday 13, May across PC, PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch.
Given the strong start the game has enjoyed, then, it makes sense that the developer has announced a fairly comprehensive Evil Dead DLC roadmap, which includes a new map heavily based on Castle Kandar from Army of Darkness, coming later this summer.
By all accounts, the game is good – aside from a few accessibility gripes and some balancing issues, our own Kelsey thought it was a groovy, gory romp in her Evil Dead: The Game review. "The game itself is certainly impressive in terms of its fresh gameplay and remarkable graphics," she wrote, "and there’s good fun to be had for fans of Evil Dead and Sam Raimi."
Aside from the success of the game in and of itself, the impressive performance of the title proves something else; that the Embracer Group knows how to invest and launch games based on classic IP. Given that the holding company recently acquired a slew of Square Enix IP for $300 million, the immediate success of Evil Dead: The Game will likely make for pleasant reading for anyone thinking that Tomb Raider, say, may have ended up in dubious hands.
Square Enix may be keeping hold of Just Cause, Life Is Strange, and Outriders, but classic IP like Tomb Raider, Deus Ex, Lara Craft Go, Legacy of Kain, Gex, and more besides have been offloaded onto Embracer.
The success of Evil Dead: The Game is a good sign; it suggests that Embracer isn't just some soulless, faceless investment corporation set on extracting as much profit from its properties as it can... it suggests that, actually, there is a level of care and respect for its IP – enough to launch a game that sells 100,000 units per day in its launch week, anyway.
To put it a more simple way: Embracer Group considers 500k units of a game sold in its first week a success. Square Enix would have probably made a public statement, saying it fell below expectations, and then ignored it for 10 years. For the recently-offloaded IP, this could be the start of a brilliant second chance.