Good news for fans of AA-level games: Atomic Heart is actually doing fairly well. As reported by Mp1st.com, the publisher of Atomic Heart, Focus Entertainment, released a revenue report that claims that the company’s overall revenues are up about 36% from last year. This inlcudes everything that the company publishes, but Atomic Heart sales in particular were mentioned as being largely responsible. It apparently performed well over the publisher’s expectations too, garnering over 5 million registered players to date, it seems.

I don’t know about you all, but I see this as fantastic news! As the AAA space becomes ever more rife with broken releases and cookie-cutter live services and ever-expanding open worlds (with little to nothing to actually do in them), seeing lower-tier games do well is perhaps the best thing we could hope to see. Sure, AA games are perfect. Atomic Heart had some story and mechanical issues, as did games like Vampyr, but they are nonetheless offering new and interesting experiences where AAA games absolutely are not. So for me personally, anything that encourages publishers like Focus Entertainment to keep investing in these sorts of games is an absolute win.

For a very long time now, AAA gaming has (with a couple of exceptions) NOT been leading the charge when it comes to innovation. Sure they’re usually the most pretty and expansive games on the market, but they’re also not terribly fun most of the time. Usually the only time AAA gets fun is when they’re uh, (ahem)…borrowing successful ideas from the AA and indie spaces and either advancing them or polishing them further. I guess this is all to say that the only way gaming will continue to see real advancement is if these smaller-scale, lower-budget projects keep getting funded, made and published.

---

How do you feel about this news? Have you tried Atomic Heart yourself? How do you feel about the AA space? What about AAA?

Image captured from the Atomic Heart gameplay teaser