Obsidian and inXile acquired by Microsoft

[Luckmann]

Marketing, "first and foremost", is about creating demand by convincing people that they must buy what you're selling.

This is one of the biggest misconceptions about marketing. The most important component of marketing is not advertisement, it is in fact market research. If you try to create demand for something for which demand does not exist in the first place, you are going to have a very, very bad time.

The Magic Nicer-Dicer Plus disagrees.

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

Puzzled by this claim that Deadfire was "more of the same." It's not a Fallout 2-style slam dunk. They made it open world, sunk a lot more money into graphics and voice acting, improved the writing, changed/improved the system (multiclassing, subclasses, marginalizing that pesky "Vancian casting" thing), improved combat pacing and combat encounters. What did Baldur's Gate 2 do over its predecessor? Turn an open world into one big open city plus a linear rest of the game, more races and kits, stronghold quests, more writing and romances. Not Fallout 2, but nothing too grand, not all that different from Deadfire.

True except for the writing, and pacing is debatable.

 

[Shadenuat]

improved the writing

ahem

 

[HeatEXTEND]

Fallout games were VERY short, (you can speedrun them in 10 minutes)

bullshit argument

 

[Roguey]

True except for the writing, and pacing is debatable.

ahem

"Improved" doesn't mean good. Most people seem to agree that the removal of text dumps made it better.

Furthermore, digging out old NPD numbers, Fallout sold 144,000 copies in North America stores after about 31 months, Fallout 2 sold 123,000 after about 19 months. Yeah, Fallout 2 sold fewer, but it also sold more copies per month in the same amount of time. Funny how a sequel that was just "a lot more of the same with quality of life improvements and a car" sold faster but not significantly more, but Deadfire gets the massive drop-off.

 

[fantadomat]

 

[TemplarGR]

bullshit argument

I call bullshit on your "bullshit argument". Fallout 1 and 2 were long games? Only if you were a retarded player and didn't know what to do... I believe a player of average IQ could easily complete them in 10 hours max...

 

[PorkBarrellGuy]

as we can see here the sequel to LlamaLlamaDuck is a disappointment

 

[fantadomat]

as we can see here the sequel to LlamaLlamaDuck is a disappointment

My link/video is more catchy,you could even listen to it on repeat.

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

True except for the writing, and pacing is debatable.

ahem

"Improved" doesn't mean good. Most people seem to agree that the removal of text dumps made it better.

No, the writing is substanially worse. You’ll see when you play. Sure, there’s less of it, but what’s there is often written in the style of twitter or text messages. The content isn’t great either, but the form is a glaring step down.

 

[fantadomat]

 

[Jedi Master Radek]

So in the end Big Coprs is the only winner of Kickstarter era which made a enviroment for appearing small indie studios and middle sized to get more success, and then Big Corps just reap all of them - consolidate them.
That's the eco-system that exist, you can't break out of it.

No, for them nothing has changed. We have only learned that AA companies can't rely on Kickstarter (alone). That has been true for Obsidian, inXile and even Larian (and others).
Kickstarter is still a potentially good way to finance something for small indie studios, though.

Yep. I mean, who actually thought that a middle-sized studio could just keep Kickstarting every single niche RPG? Or did you think that you raise say 5 million, make a 5-10m budget niche RPG, and sell enough to fund 10m or 15m for your next game?

That was never, ever, ever, ever going to happen. POE1 and DOS1/2 were not the expected sales margins; they were massive successes sales-wise. Larian hit the upper 5% of what their chances were; everybody else hit the other 95%.

Look at inXile. By the time their third Kickstarter came along, you knew this was unsustainable, and probably Brian Fargo knew as well. I'm sure games like BT4 and Deadfire could have sold a bit better had things gone different, but it was stupid and insane to ever think these games would sell a million copies each time. (I don't know if Obs/inxile upper management ever thought that, but maybe some of them did some of the time, given the budgets all these games came to have.)

Kickstarter was never the "big answer". It was only ever a temporary and partial answer. If you (or the devs) ever expected KS itself to get them to a new world of sustainable mid-sized niche RPG making, then you were never realistic to begin with.

(Obviously it's a bit different for developers the size of Whalenought or something, creating games of a much smaller budget. It's them who can truly hope to be sustainable with the help of, though not entirely dependent on, KS. In that sense KS is doing great by RPG lovers.)

If they haven't burned millions of dollars on voice acting and pretty graphics it may as well be sustainable.

 

[PorkBarrellGuy]

Something tells me you have the wrong thread

 

[Fenix]

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.

 

[glass blackbird]

Wastelands 2 is one of the worst CRPGs I have played in the modern era

True except for the writing, and pacing is debatable.

ahem

"Improved" doesn't mean good. Most people seem to agree that the removal of text dumps made it better.

No, the writing is substanially worse. You’ll see when you play. Sure, there’s less of it, but what’s there is often written in the style of twitter or text messages. The content isn’t great either, but the form is a glaring step down.

It's a lot easier to ignore, though. Nobody in PoE1 ever shuts the hell up

 

[fantadomat]

Something tells me you have the wrong thread

As if there is a write thread for that shit . This is the newest PoE thread,right?

 

[PorkBarrellGuy]

Wastelands 2 is one of the worst CRPGs I have played in the modern era

That is a highly competitive race, frankly, and while WL2 had issues I didn't think it was genuinely terrible

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Because talking about design IS the most effective form of marketing these days.

Citation needed.

It's a video game. Tech is always relevant, unless you're planning to showcase your design, scripting and writing in a text game with no graphics.

Darkest Dungeon. It outsold even D:OS. What fabulous tech it must have been running on, eh?

It must have been running on some tech, because I'm pretty sure I would remember playing it with pen and paper.

 

[fantadomat]

Wastelands 2 is one of the worst CRPGs I have played in the modern era

That is a highly competitive race, frankly, and while WL2 had issues I didn't think it was genuinely terrible

Its greatest sin was being boring and repetitive,it is one of the very few rpgs that i didn't finish.

 

[Fenix]

They didn't. As much as the Codex like to claim the contrary, PoE was generally well liked.

It wasn't. People who liked it left positive reviews, rating etc, and those who don't - mostly didn't bother to do that.

Puzzled by this claim that Deadfire was "more of the same." It's not a Fallout 2-style slam dunk. They made it open world, sunk a lot more money into graphics and voice acting, improved the writing, changed/improved the system (multiclassing, subclasses, marginalizing that pesky "Vancian casting" thing), improved combat pacing and combat encounters. What did Baldur's Gate 2 do over its predecessor? Turn an open world into one big open city plus a linear rest of the game, more races and kits, stronghold quests, more writing and romances. Not Fallout 2, but nothing too grand, not all that different from Deadfire.

I'll tell you what said those who liked PoE - no story even in comparison with first game, ship/management of ship/attacking other ships - no value, better not existed at all, party mates meh, combat system is better but challange is none-existent, there is nothing to do in game. Those who liked first game...

 

[Jedi Master Radek]

Fallout 2 was good ONLY because it was a sequel to a great game. Its design was subpar to Fallout in every way

Choice and consequences were more robust in F2. Combat difficulty was also improved.

PS. I too prefer the original Fallout.

 

[Tigranes]

A little bit different, but I remember when Ensemble Studios revealed that, as far as they knew, most of their buyers bought Age of Empires to fire up the campaign single player on a lower difficulty and fuck around a bit. I had thought the heart and soul of the game was in multiplayer. But ES understood that they had to at least keep up appearances on that SP side, or they would never sell enough copies to keep going. And where some veterans were infuriated by some of the changes Age3 made and the way they affected the MP side of the equation, what was perceived by some as a clear, obvious and objective drop in quality was not necessarily met with the same response by that SP 'silent majority'.

With POE, I look at people that would come out and say things like, "I must have voice acting or I won't buy this game", or "omg poe was way too hard i dont like it", or "i wish you could have NG+ and arena mode and randomly generated maps to fight battles forever", and wonder - so do they represent one weirdo who bought the wrong game, or do they represent a sizable chunk of the potential market? I wonder if Obsidian even know themselves. I'm not sure if they have ever done any market research of any kind in a systematic way.

Take voice acting in DOS2/POE2, for example. To me it's a colossal waste of money. It makes me no likelier to buy the game. We know some people really love voice acting, and say that it would be a dealbreaker to not have it. But did voice acting help DOS2 get hundreds of thousands more sales? If so, why didn't it help with POE2? Or did it help with POE2 and they would have sold even less without it?

It's easy to sit here, mix together some facts ("Deadfire sold like shit") with some of your own opinions and feelings ("Fuck I hate its combat"), put it in a blender and come out with a plausible narrative. The problem is, if somebody else has a different assessment ("I liked its combat but fuck I hate its writing", for example), then you just have a mess of unverifiable and unfalsifiable 'cool story bros' floating around fighting each other.

 

[2house2fly]

Why did the people who felt betrayed by POE1's broken promises not leave a negative review? People leave negative reviews all the time. Pathfinder Kingmaker is still "Mixed" despite fulfilling the "BG spiritual successor" promise better than POE1. Is it because of the bugs? Why are bugs a valid reason to leave a bad review when "the entire game is not what I wanted" isn't?

 

[fantadomat]

Why did the people who felt betrayed by POE1's broken promises not leave a negative review? People leave negative reviews all the time. Pathfinder Kingmaker is still "Mixed" despite fulfilling the "BG spiritual successor" promise better than POE1. Is it because of the bugs? Why are bugs a valid reason to leave a bad review when "the entire game is not what I wanted" isn't?

Some people leave,but most don't. People that leave reviews are around 1% from what i remember. I haven't reviewed a game on gog.

 

[Major_Blackhart]

There will always be a better dev studio out there. There has been something better than Obsidian for a while now. Two of something actually: Iron Tower Studio and Stygian Software, makers and masters of Age of Decadence and Underrail.

Listen, I get people bemoaning Obsidian. But fuck it, they're dead, we're alive. Let's get on with living. And pour all our shekels into these two companies.