Rocket League has earned near $50 million

Rocket League was free for all with a PS Plus subscription when it was released in July, which surely helped the game get some traction. Studio founder and CEO Dave Hagewood spoke to the Wall Street Journal about the ups and downs the studio had went through before finding success with Rocket League.

You might be tempted to stack that up against Call of Duty‘s annual $1 billion in sales, but where Call of Duty is the product of literally hundreds of staff across developer, publisher and marketing, Rocket League was produced by a handful of developers on a comparative shoestring of under $2 million.

The full article is a fascinating read – and a fun one, too. The studio had done work for Mass Effect 3 and Gears of War, noting that while those who played Rocket League precursor “Battle-Cars” appreciated what the studio brought in terms of gameplay, the main trouble surrounding the studio was awareness of their product.

All that success has lead to using famous and licensed cars. The story also mentions the game reaching 8 million registered players, a figure that was disclosed previously. Deciding to partner for a free release on PlayStation Plus ended up going great, generating way more word of mouth this time around and accounting for a non-specific “several million” free downloads that went a long way towards the eight million total PC and PlayStation accounts that exist now.

Rocket League is now only available for PlayStation 4 and PC, but is coming to Xbox One in February. At the Game Awards this year the game won the awards for Best Sports/Racing title and Best Independent Game.