Proving that, at least in this instance, the SteamDB user numbers and player review scores do indeed serve as an accurate reflection of a game’s financial performance, Deck Nine Games’ Life is Strange: Double Exposure has reportedly resulted in significant losses for its publisher, Square Enix, and has even been cited as the reason for the company’s operating profit decreasing compared to the previous year.
Square Enix
The report comes from a Japanese analyst Hideki Yasuda, who stated that despite Square Enix achieving major success with the Dragon Quest III remaster – selling over 2 million copies – the triumph was largely overshadowed in the publisher’s eyes by the “significant losses” it incurred from Life is Strange: Double Exposure.
According to Yasuda, the game’s poor performance was so severe that it was responsible for the company’s operating income decreasing by 4.4% during the entire nine-month period of Q1-Q3 in fiscal year 2025 compared to the same period in 2024.
Although the analyst hasn’t provided any estimates for how large those “significant losses” are in terms of a concrete number of copies sold, the Steam analytics website Gamalytic estimates the game sold, in its best-case scenario, only around 145,000 copies on Steam. This would likely mean that across all platforms, the game sold between 300,000 and 500,000 copies or fewer – a result that would indeed mean substantial financial losses for the publisher, given the cost of modern AAA titles.
Please note that even those guesstimated sales numbers are generous and based on the highest, most game-favoring projections. In reality, they are likely even lower than that, as Double Exposure has only reached a peak concurrent player count of 8.5 thousand on Steam, and its current 24-hour peak sits at 116 players – not 116 thousand, just 116.
As for the main reason why the game has flopped so hard, it’s fair to say that Deck Nine Games made the catastrophic mistake of disappointing the series’ loyal fans, who widely criticized Double Exposure for many reasons – the biggest being the absence of Chloe Price, Max Caulfield’s love interest from the original title – and as a result, the game currently holds a 4.3 score on Metacritic and Mixed reviews on Steam.
While disappointing loyal fans, as harsh as it may sound, can sometimes be profitable for a developer if they are replaced by a new and much larger fanbase – Bethesda’s Skyrim and Fallout 4, for example, were both financial successes despite being hated by many Morrowind and Interplay Fallout fans – the latest Life is Strange failed to draw in a new audience, and because of this, the developer conducted a round of layoffs just a month before Christmas last year.
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