We've already established that Rocket League, the auto/sports game that blends crazy cars with physcis-bending soccer, is a ton of silly fun. But for developer Psyonix, it's also proven incredibly lucrative, to the tune of—hold on to your Santa hats—nearly $50 million in revenue, a figure that the Wall Street Journal describes, with just a wee bit of understatement, as "unusual" for an independently published game.
Psyonix spent about two years and close to $2 million making the game, according to the report, which it funded through contract work on other titles. "We paid the bills by working on some of the biggest games in the industry," founder Dave Hagewood said, including Mass Effect 3 and Gears of War.
Interestingly, the addition of Back to the Future's famous Delorean to the game was actually the result of Universal Pictures approaching the studio, and not the other way around. That was apparently when the developers first realized they might have a big hit on their hands, although Hagewood added, "It didn't really sink in until they told me they had to get Steven Spielberg's approval."
Since then, Psyonix has done a deal with Bethesda to add the Vault Boy from Fallout 4 to the game, and more recently it added a pile of holiday goodies through an update that includes antlers, Christmas trees, and Snow Day, an unranked three-on-three play style that trades the giant soccer ball for a giant hockey puck.
