Rocket League revenues nearing $50m

Developer Psyonix has revealed the staggering success of 2015 hit Rocket League.

The game has since its launch in July raised almost $50m in revenue, The Wall Street Journal reports. It also now has over 8m registered players, up from the 6m reported in September.

The studio also reiterated that the extent of the game’s success took it very much as a surprise. In fact, it wasn’t until it was approached by Universal about a licensing deal – which eventually led to the release of Back to the Future DLC – that the penny started to drop.

It didn’t really sink in until they told me they had to get Steven Spielberg’s approval,” Psyonix founder Dave Hagewood said.

The site also speculates that a deal could be in the offing to bring KITT of Knight Rider fame to the game.

Hagewood will still not specify how many times the game was downloaded for free as part of its debut PlayStation Plus promotion, although he did reveal the number was ‘several million’ and that he credits the deal for much of the title’s media exposure.

In July Hagewood admitted that he wondered what revenues might have been were it not for the agreement with Sony.

I will always wonder; given how much it has taken off, you have to wonder,” he admitted. You look at the amount of downloads and you go ‘Wow, that would have made a lot of money if we’d had even a tenth of that in paid sales’. But we knew what we were doing when we made that deal. We knew that was a possibility."

In September the studio said it was considering a physical release for the game.