CEO of Remedy Steps Down Shortly After FBC: Firebreak Misses Sales Targets

By Elijah Gonzalez | October 22, 2025 | 10:15am

Video Games News Remedy

CEO of Remedy Steps Down Shortly After FBC: Firebreak Misses Sales Targets

Remedy announced in a stock exchange release today that the company’s CEO, Tero Virtala, will be immediately stepping down from his role. The release described this as something that had been “mutually agreed” upon between Virtala and the Board of Directors. Virtala had been in the role since August 2016.

Virtala will “continue at the service of the company” during a transition period, with Markus Mäki, one of the founders, taking on the role of interim CEO as of today while they search for a permanent replacement. Mäki is described in the statement as “a member of the company’s core management team responsible for production.” He will be stepping down from his previous position as Chairman of the Board, with Henri Österlund taking his place.

“I want to thank Tero Virtala for his substantial contribution to the management of Remedy since 2016,” Mäki said in the release. “I personally thank Tero for good cooperation and wish him all the best for the future.”

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While no rationale was provided for the sudden change, it isn’t particularly hard to guess. The company’s previous stock exchange release is a profit warning attributed to the poor sales of its recently released multiplayer game, FBC: Firebreak, which didn’t reach Remedy’s “internal targets.” Specifically, the game is currently at a “non-cash impairment” of EUR 14.9 million, or roughly $17,234,085, due to its development costs and publishing and distribution rights, which ostensibly means the game’s expected value is far less than what they thought it would be.

The profit warning very starkly adjusts the company’s 2025 outlook from the expectation that its operating profit would be positive and above the previous year’s to expecting it to be negative and below last year’s numbers.

FBC: Firebreak is a multiplayer spin-off of Control released on June 17. The game opened with only about 1,900 concurrent players on Steam, a number that steeply dropped over the next few months until its current 24-hour peak of 34 concurrents. While Remedy has released updates for the game to try and improve its onboarding process after promising continued support, it doesn’t seem as though these changes have improved its player count.

The news of Remedy replacing its CEO will likely concern many long-time fans of the studio who’ve come to appreciate it as a much-needed counterpoint to the increasing homogenization and stagnation of the bigger-budget gaming space. While it’s certainly possible that the company will course-correct by pivoting away from multiplayer games like Firebreak, it’s hard to know what a change in management will bring. The studio is currently working on remakes of Max Payne 1 and 2, as well as Control 2.