Control Resonant Is Remedy's Fastest-Selling Game, a Year After Its Worst
A million copies in three weeks, warm reviews and a 92% Steam rating: the Finnish studio behind Max Payne and Alan Wake has bounced back hard. Here is how a risky genre switch paid off.
On August 18, 1995, a group of Finnish demoscene coders founded a games company in Espoo. On August 18, 2026, exactly thirty-one years later, that company announced its newest game had "gone gold". Five weeks after that, CONTROL Resonant became the fastest-selling game in Remedy Entertainment's history.
The sequel to 2019's Control launched digitally on September 24, 2026, for PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, and sold more than 1 million copies in three weeks. On Steam, it holds a 92% positive rating from more than 10,000 reviews. A macOS version is planned for later in 2026.
A new hero and a new genre
CONTROL Resonant is not simply Control 2. Remedy changed two of the most important things about the original.
- The hero: instead of Jesse Faden, players control her brother, Dylan Faden, whose story was left hanging at the end of the first game.
- The genre: Remedy has said it is "fully committing" to being an action role-playing game, with character statistics, several talent trees and customisable weapons. The combat moved from third-person shooting to melee.
The game still runs on Remedy's own Northlight engine and keeps the series' love of strange architecture and bureaucratic horror. But this is a very different game to play, and that was a real risk.
How the reviews landed
Critics mostly liked the gamble. On Metacritic, the game scores 83 on PC and PS5 and 81 on Xbox Series X|S, and 86% of critics on OpenCritic recommend it. Individual scores ranged from GameSpot's 9/10 and IGN's 8/10 to PC Gamer's 76 and Eurogamer's 3/5, so not everyone is convinced by the move away from gunplay.
The game has also picked up two Golden Joystick Award nominations, for Best Supporting Performer and Best Visual Design.
Why the sales matter so much
The success matters because 2025 was Remedy's worst year in a long time. Its co-op shooter FBC: Firebreak, set in the Control universe, launched on June 17, 2025 and fell well short of sales expectations. Remedy reported 2025 revenue of 59.5 million euros and a net loss of 13.0 million euros, and long-time CEO Tero Virtala stepped down in October 2025.
CONTROL Resonant is also a big financial bet. Its initial development budget was 50 million euros, and Remedy estimated it would need to sell 3 to 4 million copies over its lifetime to double that money. To spread the risk, the studio had bought full rights to the Control series from publisher 505 Games for 17 million euros in February 2024, and in August 2024 partnered with Annapurna to fund half of development.
From Max Payne to the Remedy Connected Universe
Remedy has always been a studio of big ideas on modest budgets. Max Payne sold more than seven million copies and brought "bullet time" to games. Alan Wake (2010) sold over 3.2 million but not enough, at the time, to fund a sequel; that took until 2023. Quantum Break (2016) mixed a game with a live-action TV show. And Control (2019) tied many of these worlds together into what fans call the Remedy Connected Universe.
The studio is not done with its past, either. Its remakes of Max Payne and Max Payne 2, funded by Rockstar Games and also built on Northlight, are still in development, with no release date.
What's next
Short term, Remedy has the macOS version to ship and a growing player base to keep happy. Longer term, the Max Payne remakes are the next big release we know about. If CONTROL Resonant keeps selling at this pace, Remedy will have something it has rarely had: breathing room. For a studio that spent 2025 apologising for a misfire, that is quite a turnaround.