Remedy’s first exclusive title for Microsoft platforms was a great story-driven survival horror third person game, set in the supernatural world of a writer’s mind. Alan Wake was Remedy’s second great franchise after Max Payne that took 7 years to be released by the Swedish studio in 2010, which received mostly positive reviews and managed to end in a way that developing a sequel could be potentially available. However, the studio decided to work on another IP and not to cultivate a sequel for the writer’s story, but it doesn’t mean the studio hasn’t work on it at all.
According to an interview with Thomas Puha, director of communications at Remedy, he revealed the studio had been working on Alan Wake 2 previously but “it didn’t pan out” and some factors including “time, money and resources” avoided the team from developing the sequel properly enough to get released and be a successful hit just like the first entry. Puha said:
We were working on Alan Wake 2 years ago and it just didn’t pan out, so there’s nothing – we’re just booked solid for the next couple of years, really. We do own the Alan Wake IP, but it’s never quite as simple as that, but yeah, we do own it.
A lot of the things that Remedy has done in the last five years is really about putting the company into a position where we have more control. I mean, the name [of the game] really comes almost from that, and it’s giving us, as a company, the opportunity to decide what happens when the game is out. So, of course, we’re always trying to build a franchise.
We spent all that time creating the world and everything, and when you only do it for one game, it’s just a lot of work. We’ve got nothing against sequels, so definitely Control is something that we want to be working on in the future. But of course, the first game has to be as good as it can to even build that platform that we can make more, so that’s what we’re focused on.
Does that mean we always make the right decision? Of course not. But at least we are the ones making it, and we’re really trying to make sure that we get to make more Control. That’s the hope. Of course, that was the hope with Alan Wake, and these things didn’t really work out, but hopefully we’ve learned from that.
Based on what Puha said, it seems the studio was eager to develop sequels rather than creating new IPs, but maybe the way they’ve chosen to be an independent developer, has ended up in not developing Alan Wake 2 or even Quantum Break 2 any more. Like it or not, Remedy now has it’s new IP, Control, which has no dependency on any other company or publisher, so it would receive sequels, if the first entry shines well at launch. Control will be available on August 27 for PS4, Xbox One and PC.
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A Nintendo Switch trailer was also released.
According to SteamDB.
An announcement trailer was also released.