The Walking Dead games generated $1 billion in revenue, and Netflix show generated 1.3 billion hours of viewing in 2023

Franchises don’t get better than The walking dead. It has been a massive success in everything from comic books to TV shows to games.

Gaming alone generated more than $1 billion in revenue, and the Netlix show attracted 1.3 billion viewing hours in 2023, according to a report from Owl & Co. During that year, the TV series was the third most watched series – after 13 years. The TV program has started.

Hernan Lopez, founder of Owl & Co., said in an interview with GamesBeat that The Walking Dead, which first appeared as a comic book written by the creator Robert Kirkman In 2003, it is the most successful original entertainment franchise created this century. In 2010, Kirkman started Skybound Entertainment with David Alpert.

They wanted to build an IP company aimed at developing IP across all media. They created a “writer’s room” overseen by Kirkman to figure out the different paths the entertainment venue should take. And over the past two decades, Kirkman noted in our 2023 interview, gaming movies and TV shows have finally turned out to be good because the creators were gamers themselves. In parallel, The Walking Dead has achieved great success across many platforms. and Skybound has raised funding In 2022 to double its strategy.

Lopez doesn’t have numbers for 2024 yet, but he believes the success continues.

“There has never been a show like this,” Lopez said.

Featuring more than 330 episodes across seven live-action television series, The Walking Dead continues to break records for Netflix as new generations of viewers discover it. Owl & Co. said: Syndication alone is worth $83 million annually to Netflix, taking into account the average cost of an hour of viewing.

The Walking Dead games in particular have generated over $1 billion in consumer revenue. The games generated $100 million in revenue for both The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners and The Walking Dead: Survivals. The Walking Dead: Road to Survival has grossed over $500 million in revenue and 100 million downloads. The Walking Dead: The Telltale Definitive Series has 80 million episodes sold for more than $300 million in revenue.

“It’s been a huge hit here in the U.S. but it’s also No. 1 in 150 countries around the world,” Skybound CEO David Alpert said in an interview with GamesBeat. “It’s one of the top three shows in the world right now on Netflix. That kind of blew my mind.”

Albert noted that his daughter was born in the same year the show began. She’s now old enough to watch it with her friends on Netflix.

“There’s a whole generation that grew up hearing about this show and hearing about its success and they’ve read the comics and played the games and bought the merchandise. They’ve seen all of that done by their older siblings and their parents,” Albert said. “People are rediscovering it. This whole generation is finding this huge success. That’s the bigger story here.”

Kirkman started what was formerly called transmedia until people decided it was a dirty word because so many transmedia efforts had failed. But somehow, Kirkman made it work. Skybound Entertainment has become an umbrella for many creators trying to achieve the same thing. She is now pushing the Invincible series on Amazon Prime TV platform. The success of The Walking Dead gives the company the creative freedom to pursue other opportunities and take more financial risks.

The company continues to publish The Walking Dead Deluxe comics (193 comic issues to date). The Telltale game series continues to achieve huge sales. Overall, he said, it shows that zombies have always been fertile ground for video games, but that the IP’s longevity means its world and experiences are unparalleled.

Historically, the company has licensed its properties to others to manufacture. Scopely created The Walking Dead: Road to Survival for mobile, while Skydance made The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners – a VR, console and PC game. Telltale has created The Walking Dead series of narrative-driven games. Each game has been a hit in its own category.

But when Telltale (later Reborn), Skybound bought back the narrative game series and published it as a catalog title. Lopez said the show’s staying power was amazing.

“Their retention rate from episode and season to season is much higher than any other show on Netflix,” Lopez said. “The Walking Dead is the #1 entertainment franchise for non-kid shows created entirely this century.”

However, in printing money, Skybound was taking a lot of risks.

“A lot of other exploitation or marketing in the world is basically the same thing over and over again,” Albert said. “We actually have a world full of rules and characters, but there’s a whole lot of opportunity to tell new stories.”

Characters from the show are very popular, as are characters like Clementine from the Telltale game. Many of them were created in a writer’s room with a shared architect.

“That’s it, Robert Kirkman,” Albert said. “He’s the genius who figures out how to deal with it, and he’ll design it,” so there are crossovers with other parts of the series.

He added: “(It all) exists in the same universe. It roots you and puts you inside the world of The Walking Dead, but it doesn’t limit you to just seeing the characters we see in the comics. It gives you an opportunity to find your own way in what you do best, and I think that’s one of the reasons we’ve achieved such success.

Although the success is astonishing, it creates a problem reminiscent of “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” a nonfiction business book by the late Clay Christensen. He noted that successful companies are so focused on exploiting their unique success story that they cannot start a viable second business venture. They have expectations so high for the new company that it can never live up to the first success.

However, Albert notes that the company continues to invest in comic books. These comics focus on telling new stories, can test new ideas and become TV shows, movies, or games. Ultimately they can also generate a lot of retail merchandise sales. A lot of it comes from Kirkman, but the company also collaborates with other content creators as well as some sort of third-party publishers of intellectual property.

People have seen zombie stories before, but his story wasn’t just set in a zombie world. “His concept was what happens after a zombie movie ends,” Albert said. “How do they live in a world where there are zombies? Your world has been shaken. What will you do the next day?”

The company began investing more heavily in Invincible, which launched around the same time as The Walking Dead. This superhero story focused on family relationships, such as the Oedipus complex. The hero is faced with the impossible choice of saving the Earth and siding with one family member over another.

“I think this is something that every teenager can relate to and every adult can relate to because they’ve been through a version of that themselves,” Albert said. “The Walking Dead and Invincible are both 21 years old at this point. They’ve been in the public consciousness for over two decades. What’s fun is that a lot of people are now discovering Invincible.

Those worlds Skybound owns are mature enough that the company, with proper management and reinvestment, can continue to make them evergreen fields, he said.

There are old intellectual properties to follow when it comes to business strategy, such as Star Trek, Star Wars, Harry Potter, and James Bond. At various points in their history, they were either worthy of imitation or were cautionary tales. With Harry Potter, children and parents can enjoy the novels. Some fans will miss, but they often come back to the show and catch up.

As for the future, Albert noted that there are thousands of new games coming out. Any new game has to compete with those from the year it was released, but it also has to compete with all the previous releases that are still very popular as well. The same goes for TV shows.

The goal becomes “finding things that overcome the noise that cuts through the clutter in any medium,” he said. We live in an age of abundance where distribution is overwhelming. There is distribution everywhere.”

One lesson learned is that franchises that already exist will remain relevant to people’s current entertainment diet.

“It’s like physics, where something in motion will continue to stay in motion,” he said. “People know about it, and discovering it is the biggest challenge of any content we have.”

As for the state of the industry, both the gaming industry and Hollywood have had difficult years. They’ve had tensions like strikes around artificial intelligence. There are still big hits and there are still winners and losers.

As for dealing with new trends such as artificial intelligence, Albert believes that respecting intellectual property is crucial to determining whether it will be accepted or not. Businesses need to embrace AI the right way.

“We’re going to continue to expand the world of The Walking Dead. We’re going to look for new places to expand the stories. I don’t have a specific announcement yet, but I think we’re looking at what’s the best medium. What’s the best kind of thing to really do in something new with The Walking Dead? We can take “All this newfound excitement and engagement. How do we move it forward? We don’t want to do the same old thing.”

Disclosure: I have family who work at Skybound.