The recently released 007 First Light has passed another sales milestone as IO Interactive’s latest third person action adventure title is now confirmed to have sold over 3 million units. The devs have earlier announced 2.7 million sales which the game had achieved in a week and now in an interview with IGN, IO Interactive CEO Hakan Abrak has confirmed that 007 First Light has surpassed 3 million sold units worldwide. The James Bond title is also expected to arrive on the Nintendo Switch 2 later this summer, which will boost the sales numbers even further.
007 First Light has also been the fastest selling title for the Danish studio, which means it has sold much higher than all of the Hitman titles by the developers. “By all measures it’s freaking successful,” Abrak said, confirming that it’s far beyond the company’s internal expectations.
There were also an earlier report claiming that 007 First Light had cost approx. $200 million to develop, although according to the CEO, those numbers aren’t entirely accurate.
“We give big fat bonuses to our teams if they do hit a few goals,” Abrak said. “There’s some bonuses in there to be paid out in the future. There’s marketing in there and whatnot. So it’s not the actual cost of the product. But we’ll come up with all that. It’s by far the most expensive one, but it’s not like for the game itself, not $200 million.”
He also said that unlike other studios where costs rise up when making sequels, IO Interactive prefers a different approach altogether.
“Ambition is not necessarily that it’s more expensive. Ambition is, the platform you build, how do you keep giving amazing experiences from that and how do you iterate on a sequel from that in a smart way, where it’s retroactively maybe lifting the first one as well, like we did with World of Assassination? Some of this approach to concept and ambition, one could think could be applied to Bond as well,” he said.
