Eternity PoE II: Deadfire Sales Analysis Thread

[Parabalus]

I'm far more interested in getting an accurate number of players figures. Counting "Feargus' money" (ok, I know it's not his) is secondary for me. And deducting the average price per unit is an exercise that gets increasingly tough to tell how good you did at.

Why do player numbers matter to you?

What do player numbers represent? Individuals interested in this game, and in this type of game. Isn't this also valuable to know?

I'd say total earnings are a better marker of interest than total player numbers. When shit gets discounted the interest bar is lower, especially when it gets bundled.

The results are pretty depressing either way.

 

[Mustawd]

We really need geographic numbers, but 300,000 is not credible unless they’re defrauding their Fig investors and I don’t think they’re that dumb

There is a chance that the dividend rate paid was lower than 85%. Which is not out of the realm of possibility. This is especially true given Fig’s own dismal financial situation.

Technically the Fig Board can say that financial issues allow them to lower the dividend rate lower than 85%. This would cause a flatter curve than what you see in the sample Fig campaign chart. Flatter curve meaning more units sold.

We’ll know more after their next semiannual report.

EDIT: However, they’d need to be using a very low dividend rate to be getting close to what 300k units would be. For example if you assume an avg price of $30 and a divident rate of 50% you get to 256,893 units.

 

[Mustawd]

Hopefully I didn’t fuck it up again:

On the sensitivity analysis, the left blue numbers represent possible dividend rates and the above blue numbers represent possible avg price per unit.

 

[santino27]

Examples in these things can also really fuck over the issuer. If the actual mechanism is that Fig gets whatever DRIL decides to give them, then they really shouldn't have included those models that suggest otherwise. I've seen hedge and private equity funds get in trouble for exactly this kind of thing with the SEC. The fact that Dark Rock and Fig have a lot of overlap in their ownership also wouldn't help in the event of litigation.

It's not what DRIL decides to give them (if they follow the agreement). Here's how it works:

1. PoE2 makes $1000 from new copies on Steam.
2. Steam takes $300, DRIL gets $700.
3. Fig takes 16.1% of DRIL's $700 = $112.7.
4. Fig shares 85% of that with investors (could be higher/lower at the board's discretion).

However, if DRIL has an arrangement with another company, Fig could be taking 16.1% of a smaller amount than expected.

Example: if Versus Evil takes 10% after distributions fees, DRIL makes $630 instead of $700. Now, instead of making $112.7, Fig makes $101.43.

DRIL could preserve Fig's revenue by paying VE after Fig's cut. However, by sharing the revenue with VE before that step, DRIL and VE can have more flexibility (and money) with their arrangement. They could keep more money between themselves by giving VE a bigger cut, even if that money goes back to DRIL in another way. For instance: they may have signed a deal where VE pays for the VO and console ports in exchange for a bigger cut. DRIL would technically make less money from each new copy, but they could be saving money in the process, since they were originally going to pay for that stuff themselves.

So, Fairfax isn't Avellone after all. It's Feargus himself.

Feargus is Avellone?

/mindblown

 

[Urthor]

...200k players on Steam is NOT 200k sales...

This is indisputably true.

If you wipe 100k off the 203k that was in the Steam database leak because they are all backers

Fig shows 33,614 backers, what is this 100k?

You are also not accounting for GOG sales.

The 100k-ish full price copies was reverse engineered from the Fig Dividends. If anyone here is an investor they could verify it easily.

I believe the great irony is that the FIG investors can't verify it easily.


The FIG investors got an email saying 4 words "congratulations you have $192.60" pretty much, and it was up to Reddit detectives to go back to the original SEC filing, add up the units then multiply that by the dividend, THEN figure out the break even point from calculating revenue from the average selling price.

Aka FIG was doing their darndest to be annoying and misleading about this

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

The same faith will happen to Wasteland 3 Fig royalties. I think Fig was a good idea in theory. But Fig flagship titles are sequels to isometric cRPGs, where the previous game had massively inflated sales through nostalgia and early Kickstarter hype. So the predictions for sales of the sequels ended up overblown as well, investors through far too many at it than it was reasonable, and the disappointment will surely kill the whole project.

 

[2house2fly]

Ok, I understand now. It still doesn't explain the steam leak numbers + an unknown number of GOG players.

compared to steam gog sales are a rounding error

 

[Jarpie]

The same faith will happen to Wasteland 3 Fig royalties. I think Fig was a good idea in theory. But Fig flagship titles are sequels to isometric cRPGs, where the previous game had massively inflated sales through nostalgia and early Kickstarter hype. So the predictions for sales of the sequels ended up overblown as well, investors through far too many at it than it was reasonable, and the disappointment will surely kill the whole project.

There's still Psychonauts 2 coming, I think it'll be big slamdunk or horrible bomb.

 

[2house2fly]

There is a quest in Arcanum where you have to follow a conspiracy about gnomes. It turns out that gnomes were kidnapping prominent human females and making Ogres force rape them until they can't produce any more half-ogre kids aka death. They were using the half-ogres for bodyguards.
And from here comes the hate for gnomes in all codexers.

Play the fucking game and stop being an ass mate.

so wait, every gnome in the entire setting was involved in this?

 

[Major_Blackhart]

so wait, every gnome in the entire setting was involved in this?

Yes damn you. Yes. The greedy bastards with their big noses.

 

[Mustawd]

it was up to Reddit detectives to go back to the original SEC filing, add up the units then multiply that by the dividend, THEN figure out the break even point from calculating revenue from the average selling price.

In the meantime we did it all ourselves here

 

[Roguey]

so wait, every gnome in the entire setting was involved in this?

No, considering you can play as a gnome. Nothing wrong with the working class gnomes for example.

You are not a part of the gnomish capitalist bourgeoisie, and instead grew up as a day laborer. You suffer a penalty to Haggle, but gain a bonus to Strength (+1).

Haggle -2 / ST +1

 

[2house2fly]

I see. Presumably there's some kind of racial animus behind it which allows a gnome character to end the quest by approving and saying nothing more about it

 

[fantadomat]

working class gnomes

Such thing doesn't exist! That is like working jew!

 

[Chris Avellone]

Now, Versus Evil and their brazilian developer could totally fuck up the release of the console versions. I wouldn't put it past them to fuck it up royally. That would hurt Obsidian, more than it would hurt Red Cerberus and Versus Evil. People google Deadfire and they see Obsidian, they won't bother to read that the game is being made by some brazilians for the consoles.

Well, one advantage to the console releases is that they come out well after the core release, so a lot of the data-driven system bugs/additions/iteration is done and tested by then, so it would seem to me at least the design and system side of things would be more solid. (I didn't follow the console releases of any of the crowdsourced RPGs, so I don't have any metrics for this, though.)

I'm not saying other problems couldn't occur, but at least the game is in a more finished/polished state when it's ready to be console-ized.

 

[Quillon]

the game is in a more finished/polished state when it's ready to be console-ized.

Which might be why they are supporting the game well enough(even into 2019) despite apparent low sales. How well did PoE1 do in console market I wonder :/

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

I'd imagine publisher pays for the console port and takes most of the resulting revenue, and for InXile/Obsidian/Larian it's more about increasing their outreach and connecting with new audience. They're well aware that most people play these games on PC, but if someone else wants to pay for it and take a risk, might just put it on console and see how it goes.

 

[Chris Avellone]

I'd imagine publisher pays for the console port and takes most of the resulting revenue, and for InXile/Obsidian/Larian it's more about increasing their outreach and connecting with new audience. They're well aware that most people play these games on PC, but if someone else wants to pay for it and take a risk, might just put it on console and see how it goes.

It’s definitely profitable for someone since they keep doing it, although I imagine everybody was scrutinizing the first one to do the iso-RPG port to consoles to see how it went (also some companies didn’t want to reveal they were doing a console version until later in the campaign out of concern of alienating the PC audience).

I have a hard time seeing Obsidian not wanting a good chunk of the console revenue, though, especially since that revenue’s not tied to Fig, but I don’t know the terms of the console contracts or how much Vs Evil is involved (if someone knows more details, I'd love to know).

Was Wasteland 2 the first one to go to consoles?

EDIT: And I'd agree on the outreach/new audience parts, especially if you can get a good port pipeline going. The ports for Larian and Pillars seemed to get good reviews as well, IIRC.

 

[2house2fly]

the game is in a more finished/polished state when it's ready to be console-ized.

Which might be why they are supporting the game well enough(even into 2019) despite apparent low sales. How well did PoE1 do in console market I wonder :/

The character importing, for example, has got to be something done with a console audience in mind

 

[aweigh]

PS4 version of PoE uses a radial menu:

Movement is mapped 1:1 to the analog stick, there is no click-to-move, and objects are focused on automatically by the "cursor" when you approach them, just like in the KOTOR games.

 

[Thal]

We really need geographic numbers, but 300,000 is not credible unless they’re defrauding their Fig investors and I don’t think they’re that dumb

There is a chance that the dividend rate paid was lower than 85%. Which is not out of the realm of possibility. This is especially true given Fig’s own dismal financial situation.

Technically the Fig Board can say that financial issues allow them to lower the dividend rate lower than 85%. This would cause a flatter curve than what you see in the sample Fig campaign chart. Flatter curve meaning more units sold.

We’ll know more after their next semiannual report.

EDIT: However, they’d need to be using a very low dividend rate to be getting close to what 300k units would be. For example if you assume an avg price of $30 and a divident rate of 50% you get to 256,893 units.

Also, for those who don't do any investing, this is a standard practice in all publically traded companies as well. I don't know how they got to the number 85% of revenue, but it is fairly normal for a succesful company with little need for new investments, which is what Fig aimed to be. Well established profitable companies usually pay around 50% and invest the rest into maintaining their competetive edge. Growing companies usually do not pay any dividends at all, because they need to invest it all. No profit, no dividend. And you can cancel dividends too, even after announcing the amount per share, if the financial situation changes between that and the payout. The point is, that number was never set in stone, and it never could be. You cover the costs first and then decide what percentage of revenue is appropriate to share with the owners.

So nothing shady in the practice itself. The shady part is that I suspect many people who put their money into making these games didn't know how the system works, and Fig certainly didn't go out its way to inform them. The risk is way bigger than most people imagine and accountability is suspect. Even if you do invest into making of Pillars 2, the company that makes it is only responsible to its owners, not to you. This is a bad combination. Public companies are by law required to inform their owners and the public (you) at the first instance, if significant changes that might affect their market position occur. Private companies have no such obligation and you didn't even invest into Obsidian, you invested into Pillars 2. The fact that all kickstarted projects have changed significantly from their pitches, as well as the dirty laundry MCA brought out should tell you that the reality might be significantly different from what they promise. With stocks, at least they have to tell you at first instance, so you can make informed decisions.

Instead of being properly informative, the material on Fig's site is very superficial and market investing as a chance to be part of a project you love. This is what is called vanity investing. Not a very good way to make money, and here it was targeted at people who probably haven't done that much investing of any kind.

 

[Outlander]

Black Isle
Obsidian
Onyx engine
Dark Rock

 

[Dodo1610]

Obsidian didn't understand that the POE1's success didn't come from the quality of their game but mostly from outside factors.


1. It was a crowdfunding title: Project Eternity was one of the bigger video game crowdfunding campaigns at the time. Back then there weren't a whole lot of these games released so people still thought crowdfunding makes games automatically better. With the Obsidian name it was fairly easy for them to get a lot of attention from th RPG fan-base since unlike most of those companies they have already shipped games.
When it was released it was basically the best thing that came out of crowdfunding, since most of the other Kickstarter games turned out to be mediocre, shit or were canceled during production. POE was definitely above average, which made them stand out.



2. Novelty factor: POE was supposed to be the successor of Baldur's Gate, it was this promise which made nerds give them the 3mio$. Even if you grew up with popamole games you know that BG is the holy grail of RPGs. The one game people keep mentioning every single time when a new RPG gets released.
When it was released it got nearly perfect score and every journalist and their dogs said it was the BG3 fans were waiting for all these years ( Though I highly doubt that these journos have ever played BG to begin with). POE was definitely the closest thing we got to a BG, so all those popamolers bought the game so they could find out what these "RTWP CRPG games" are their parents talk about.
Even most players were content with it, at least with the first few hours of the game. We know now from the Steam achievements that only 46% of the players finished act 1. I am convinced that most of the praise for this game came from people that hardly played it. So we know that a lot of people bought it because of the praise the game got but very few actually bothered to play it for more then a few hours.



Deadfire didn't had these outside factors, crowdfunding is normal now and we all know today that the lack of a publisher doesn't make a game automatically better. The novelty factor is also gone there are now a whole lot of oldschoool CRPGs out and pretty much everyone has at least tried one of them. The real hardcore fans also know now that POE is not BG so their interest is also fairly low now. So who is left to buy POE2? The 5% of players that finished POE? The hardcore Obsidian fan who buys anything with their name?

The fact that they believed that Deadfire could ever reach 500k sold copies shows how out of touch with they are.

 

[Quillon]

I blame PoE name, what an uninspired title for your first IP, even the joke Soulcraft could have done better(...aaand its gone lul) at least it was catchy

 

[Lacrymas]

Very much doubt 80% of PoE1's owners didn't buy PoE2 because of the name. We've extensively talked about why PoE2 failed to recapture the audience of PoE1 and the conclusion is it's still a mystery, but it's probably mostly to do with PoE1's quality and a bit of the general disinterest in this type of game.