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Vault Dweller: Age of Decadence needs to sell 45,000 copies to be successful

Ismaul

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95K is the number of those who own all three games?
Pretty sure a bunch of the "corest RPG gamers" would go with GOG instead of Steam, as I did. Steam Spy knows fuckall.
 

Ismaul

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Codex 2014 PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech A Beautifully Desolate Campaign My team has the sexiest and deadliest waifus you can recruit.
Negus please, Gothic 2 obscure? It's about as obscure as Morrowind.

But maybe it's a different case in the kwa or whatever silly backwater you come from.
Both Gothic 1 and 2 were barely mentioned by the US media and never had any real shelf space in stores. I think I've first heard about Gothic 1 on the Codex.
RPGdot was giving it lots of coverage back in the days, that is, before it turned to shit and the Watch was formed.
 

ghostdog

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The Gothics were pretty popular in Europe. Game magazines covered them and gave them positive reviews. It's understandable they're not well known in the US, since they're from German developers and they obviously had small advertising budgets. They have that Teutonic-euro feel anyway.
 

Canus

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Vault Dweller Out of curiosity, and I absolutely understand if you don't want to go into it, what's was the total cost to you guys to develop and release AoD? Were there particular areas that ended up representing much larger amounts of the total cost than you had original foreseen?
 

Aenra

Guest
REALITY BREAK. Stop.
NEWS AT ELEVEN FOR THE CODEX. Stop.

Like children having heard of a new word that ringed nicely in their ears, i see so many posting here to relish the joy of repetition.

- So just to remind what hipster really stands for, just so we do not lose track entirely. People like you trying to hard to convince one another they are outside the norms, above the establishment's mediocrity and so on. That's who the hipster is. The retard that genuinely liked 'x' title and said so is just that; a retard. Not a hipster. Please cease using words you appear incapable of comprehending.

- Won't even go on the NEO-'old school' hardcore lovers, coming here and posting about """obscure""" games such as the Gothics.. DU and CB should really reconsider the criteria under which tags are given.

SWITCHING BACK TO BRENDA FOR THE WEATHER FORECAST. Stop.
 

Vault Dweller

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Vault Dweller Out of curiosity, and I absolutely understand if you don't want to go into it, what's was the total cost to you guys to develop and release AoD? Were there particular areas that ended up representing much larger amounts of the total cost than you had original foreseen?
It cost me about 20k, iirc. However, this number is meaningless as it doesn't reflect the actual cost of making a game but some expenses (engine, music, concept art, accounting, hosting, living expenses for Nick and Ivan for couple of years, hardware upgrades, etc). We had foreseen nothing because we had no experience and thus no idea what to "foresee".
 

Perkel

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Also time.

Either way you are close to your original 45k goal. So congratz. Like i said previosly RPGs have long legs and it will sell over decade+. Now that you make new games when you will release something people naturally will look at your portfolio and buy other games from IT.

Either way 'dex GOTY will soon put your game past 45k goal.
 
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Okay, I got the point about pricing.

But another thing - are we, the ones who played and loved original Fallouts, PS:T, Arcanum etc in late 90s-early 00s - the core audience of AoD - so few? Only 33 000 people?

Well you might have picked up over the years that a lot of people thought it was all over after Fallout 1.
 

Perkel

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Okay, I got the point about pricing.

But another thing - are we, the ones who played and loved original Fallouts, PS:T, Arcanum etc in late 90s-early 00s - the core audience of AoD - so few? Only 33 000 people?

You are looking at this from wrong side of building.

There were never bilions of people who played "isometric" rpgs. At that time compared to rest of industry they had pull similar to big games but they never reached something like 5mln.

Then you need to account that for at least decade nothing good come out and ton of people simply moved on.

Finally when those types of games will start to come out each new game will add new people to the pool. So if someone played PoE and liked it, he will probably try to look for other games like that so he may end up playing AoD or Wasteland.

Thankfully there are now few studios with full pipeline and we can expect this niche to grow over next few years.

Only thing that worries me is growth of Larian. I love those guys but Swen runs company and he probably wouldn't mind going to full AAA with their games rather than staying in niche.
 

StaticSpine

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You are looking at this from wrong side of building.

There were never bilions of people who played "isometric" rpgs. At that time compared to rest of industry they had pull similar to big games but they never reached something like 5mln.

Then you need to account that for at least decade nothing good come out and ton of people simply moved on.

Finally when those types of games will start to come out each new game will add new people to the pool. So if someone played PoE and liked it, he will probably try to look for other games like that so he may end up playing AoD or Wasteland.

Thankfully there are now few studios with full pipeline and we can expect this niche to grow over next few years.

Only thing that worries me is growth of Larian. I love those guys but Swen runs company and he probably wouldn't mind going to full AAA with their games rather than staying in niche.
I never said or thought about millions. But at least hundreds of thousands.
 
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The Gothics were pretty popular in Europe. Game magazines covered them and gave them positive reviews. It's understandable they're not well known in the US, since they're from German developers and they obviously had small advertising budgets. They have that Teutonic-euro feel anyway.

Here in Australia I'd never have heard of Gothic if it wasn't for the Codex. I literally never saw it on a shelf in any game store. I'm guessing there probably was some shelf space for it somewhere, just after release, but I never saw it, and I used to look pretty extensively for anything popping up in the PC crpg sections of both the 'big retail' (Harvey Norman etc) and specialist gaming stores.

By comparison, Baldurs Gate was on shelves, usually with big promo signs and prominent shelf space, right through to the death of the retail game shop. I'm guessing if I walked into Harvey Norman tomorrow, I could find a copy of BG2, prominently marked as a 'crpg classic'. Same for FO1 and FO2.
 

Rivmusique

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Gothic 3 was definitely on shelves. Got a boxed copy from my local store, and I lived in a fairly small town. Maybe one day I'll actually finish it.

Oblivion's success probably had them looking for anything similar to try to flog, wonder how well it sold.
 

Shadenuat

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Russia probably has as many fans of Gothic as of Morrowind, but that's obvious, we like games where player character is treated like trash in the beginning and dies to random wolves. Whenever new part came out game magazines made it GOTY all the time, if there wasn't another good RPG. All games got official localization on release (with VO) and NotR got 99% at AG.ru when it came out.
 
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Crichton

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I can still remember reading a preview of Gothic in Electronic Gaming Monthly; it was only a half a page or so and basically boiled down to 'you play this random dipshit infiltrating a prison in ugly 3D'. I didn't inquire further.

Years later, I read rave reviews of Gothic II on some message board for TES games (probably gamefaqs) and pirated it. Despite being killed by goblins about 87 times in the first couple hours, I really loved it and purchased "Gothic II gold" (which included NotR) in a shop somewhat later. Despite all the bullshit NotR added, I was still hooked so I looked into buying Gothic. Unfortunately G1 could not be purchased from any US retailer, brick-and-mortar or online. I eventually ended up buying it directly from PB (importing it from Germany!) Now when I fired up G1, I was really concerned about difficulty/grinding/hording stat boost items etc because I'd read comments online about NotR restoring "G1-like difficulty" to G2. However, this was complete nonsense; G1 is the best balanced member of the series; you don't need to grind anything, you can get yourself killed if you wander into the wilderness but you can get by just fine acting in a reasonable way (much much more so than even vanilla G2, G2 NotR is 10000000% more masochistic).

In this context, perhaps you can understand why I pre-ordered Gothic 3. Sadly it never really came together; the more open world was nice, but they couldn't find a way to assemble a plot and despite all the new options, combat balancing was a joke and made even worse through level scaling. In one of the early versions of the game, I lured a couple carnivorous pigs into an orc encampment (~25 orcs) and they murdered every single orc.

Risen was a pretty decent homage to G1/G2 (right up until the bullshit final boss) but I don't know when we'll see something of their like again; from what I've heard, Risen 3 might even be worse than Gothic 3. Can Piranha Bytes rise again?
 

kwanzabot

Cipher
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Russia probably has as many fans of Gothic as of Morrowind, but that's obvious, we like games where player character is treated like trash in the beginning and dies to random wolves.

prolly since it's like living a 2nd life for russians
 

Invictus

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I read about gothic 2 in PC Gamer when they used to have Desslock as their resident RPG guy who would not only do awesome reviews but editorials on stuff like the concepts of the virtues in Ultima or the story of The Elder Scrolls
I finally got it from a Mexican copy which somehow got the punlishing rights of it and a whole bunch of hard to find RPGs like Arx Fatalis and TOEE for something like $10
 

Perkel

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Thankfully Polish mag CD-Action was always at top of the game in therms of game coverage and since it was like 200 pages every month they gave it enough space to build hype and following in polish communities.
 

zwanzig_zwoelf

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Russia probably has as many fans of Gothic as of Morrowind, but that's obvious, we like games where player character is treated like trash in the beginning and dies to random wolves. Whenever new part came out game magazines made it GOTY all the time, if there wasn't another good RPG. All games got official localization on release (with VO) and NotR got 99% at AG.ru when it came out.
IIRC I've heard about Gothic about a year or two before Oblivion was announced. Never really enjoyed TES series, though (well, except Daggerfall/Battlespire).
And imho, Gothic games (1-2) look a lot more consistent than Morrowind. The latter has somewhat better looking areas and water, while character models and animations are cringeworthy.

BTW, bought AoD ~2 weeks ago. Enjoy your beer game development, VD.
 

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