do we have any broader indication that, say, hundreds of thousands of people who bought POE really hated it and it made them swear off the sequel?
I do - I read a lot of sources, and I have seen quite often "I bought it/pirated it because they told me it's new BG, but that wasn't even close".
How do you think, what these people do next? Do they skip or do the buy PoE2?
People understood it's not their cup of tea, and it's even worse when it's a bad game.
For more realistic reaction you need to check imageboards and, for example rutracker - which serves as a popular platform for discussing stufff, where one release can easlily have hundreds of page of discussion.
We don't believe Skyrim is 10x better than PST based on sales, so why are people suddenly using this argument when it suits their feelings?
Because it's not 100% correlation - sometimes good games sells good, sometimes not, same for bad games.
Maybe they sells depend on whether this game has mass appeal or not, not because it's good or bad.
Nobody can 'prove' exactly what made Larian succeed - the graphics, the co-op, etc. - but we don't really have data on whether, say, 90% of buyers were satisfied with DOS1 while only 20% were with POE.
Nobody can't prove anything so that mean exactly nothing.
I know why DOS sales were so good, and I already said it ~milllon times.
Read my example of what quality mean and how it works.
Just a little bit more in a quality - mean much more sales.
I can use another example I made purely out of my ass, if you don't perceive music one.
Imagine a castle.
It has walls, it has towers, it has flags on the towers, and it has thin and high spire on top of the highest tower.
And there is another castle that's just as good, but doesn't have that spire.
This is what differ good castle from great - just one more detail.
And of course it would be exaggeration to say PoE2 "castle" only lacks the "spire" - it lacks even towers, maybe even walls.
To explain it in a more RPG-ish way - every level of quality acts as multiplier, not additive. If you have just one more great thing, it makes game MUCH more cool.
That's why such thing like multiplayer added so much to DOS2 - because it was already good.
Multiplayer for PoE2 wouldn't affect it that much if at all.
Look at user reviews, score aggregates, people liked it.
It all works in a little more complicated way - look at the samethings for Kingmaker and you will see everything worse there, while people playing it (and enjoying it) a lot more than PoE2.
And this thing should alarm you at least.
PoE sold 700 000k, D:OS2 sold about a million and is an outlier. In the current state of the market, this is the maximum potential.
Bullshit. The maximum potential is much more - people want to play games, they just have nothing to play. The only thing you need to avoid is to interfere with major hits like what happened with Arcanum vs Half-Life.
Sometimes, there simply is not enough demand for multiple games of a certain scale.
Only if you haven't seen isometric games for 10-20 years and start to forget what it actually is, not when you played it half a year ago, you just want more.
Though probbaly there is limits for your "I want more" but not for two games per year.
People who have so little time usually just switch to popamole games.
What really can affect demand - if every game of of the last few you played were mostly copy-cats of each other - then it's a dull experience oand you need to rest from this shit.
DOS on the other hand is very readable and easy to understand. You collect stuff. You combine stuff into other stuff. You launch fireball and stuff starts burning. Standing near fire makes you warm. Stepping into fire causes damage. Fire is being put out by water. Not only all of this is easy to understand and read off the screen. It's also very easy to tell about that to somebody else. DOS is the type of game that is easy to get into, easy to have fun with, and most importantly easy to show and explain to others why it is fun.
Exactly. It attracted many of those who NEVER played RPGs before, but they saw all the fuss about it, got hyped and joined, and multiplayer was important because it allowed to explore game and mechanics not alone but with friend. Maybe that add a courage for them.