Eternity PoE II: Deadfire Sales Analysis Thread

[Parabalus]

...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.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Dumpsterfire's failure has to do with Obsidian's insistence of making it a direct sequel and keeping the plot about gods, philosophy and spirituality.

This is something I've recently been considering. Could it be that isometric games have a hard cap on how deep and complex the plot and story can go, how nuanced and complex the characters can be, and how dramatic their arcs?

Maybe it's simply not feasible to achieve the same kind of emotional impact on the audience with an isometric RPG, (no matter how good your writing is) which you can achieve with full 3d, lipsynched, acted out in-engine cutscenes?

What if isometric RPGs can't go any deeper than BG and P:KM level of general tone and seriousness?

Have you played these three games, or you just like to post pictures? Because you are confirming what I said.

 

[fantadomat]

Dumpsterfire's failure has to do with Obsidian's insistence of making it a direct sequel and keeping the plot about gods, philosophy and spirituality.

This is something I've recently been considering. Could it be that isometric games have a hard cap on how deep and complex the plot and story can go, how nuanced and complex the characters can be, and how dramatic their arcs?

Maybe it's simply not feasible to achieve the same kind of emotional impact on the audience with an isometric RPG, (no matter how good your writing is) which you can achieve with full 3d, lipsynched, acted out in-engine cutscenes?

What if isometric RPGs can't go any deeper than BG and P:KM level of general tone and seriousness?

I don't think it's necessarily that, but rather the fact Obsidian writer team was not fit to tackle such a topic, especially at what's supposed to be ultimately a game about exploration and combat. You don't have to make it saturday morning cartoon tone like BG is, but I think you should also keep it more personal and involved. Shadowrun series for example deal with quite sentimental topics and look even worse and don't have any better sound design (much better music though) and I'd say they do a good job at pulling you into the world.

In PoE1 but especially in dumpsterfire, it all feels so disconnected and unengaging. Meanwhile in White March where story was more personal and involved, as well as with several operating factions, the game felt a lot more able to involve you in it.

Yeah,the writing in SR is a lot better than the one in PoE games. Even the setting alone is far more interesting and unique than PoE. PoE's setting is far to bland even for a generic fantasy world,it lacks any real conflicts or memorable groups/factions,it lacks any mystery at all. And the gods retardation just killed the whole world for a lot of people.

After all it is a good writing that makes you come back to the game.

 

[AwesomeButton]

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

In other words the 100k figure is coming out of someone's ass but it's too late to tell whose ass it was exactly?

 

[fantadomat]

Have you played these three games, or you just like to post pictures? Because you are confirming what I said.

Clearly you haven't played this games. They do have a lot of deepness and good writing. I say that if every time i hear about Arcanum,i go full "kill all gnomes!!!",then the game had an emotional impact on me and many others. If you have memories from those games that have attached emotions attached to them,then they do have emotional impact! All the emotion i have felt in PoE games is boredom and disgust at the shit writing.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

FreeKaner

Direct sequel would definitely make some buyers wary , but not nearly enough of them to explain monumental drop in sales. It's the owners of the first game who didn't show up.

Depends how bad the first game was in their eyes. It is pretty obvious that people that bought the first game didn't touch this one. They managed to alienate even fans like me.

Weren't you the first person on the Codex to beat the sequel?

 

[AwesomeButton]

Have you played these three games, or you just like to post pictures? Because you are confirming what I said.

Clearly you haven't played this games. They do have a lot of deepness and good writing. I say that if every time i hear about Arcanum,i go full "kill all gnomes!!!",then the game had an emotional impact on me and many others. If you have memories from those games that have attached emotions attached to them,then they do have emotional impact! All the emotion i have felt in PoE games is boredom and disgust at the shit writing.

I was going for a more commonly-accepted interpretation of the terms "emotional impact", "deep and complex plot", "nuanced and complex characters", "dramatic character arc". But if killing all the gnomes touched your soul, I guess that's ok.

What I meant to say is that scripted interactions and voiced dialogues cannot achieve the same effect that Witcher 3's storytelling or RDR's storytelling can. You don't have the medium through which to convey the same message to the "viewer" ("viewer" because at that point he is not even a player, he is watching a movie).

... and since you don't have the same medium, but instead you have a much more constrained one, you have to simplify your message in order to get it accross.

 

[frajaq]

easy solution to dogshit sales: stop making RTwP games

 

[fantadomat]

But if killing all the gnomes touched your soul, I guess that's ok.

You have no idea what i am talking about,do you?

The witcher 3 have one good story arc,and all because of the writing level and not about the pixels that move when sounds come out. The red baron story is outstanding and should be held as example of good writing! The rest of the game was ok,but didn't care about them.

 

[fantadomat]

FreeKaner

Direct sequel would definitely make some buyers wary , but not nearly enough of them to explain monumental drop in sales. It's the owners of the first game who didn't show up.

Depends how bad the first game was in their eyes. It is pretty obvious that people that bought the first game didn't touch this one. They managed to alienate even fans like me.

Weren't you the first person on the Codex to beat the sequel?

Yes,but i am not in their count number while i am in the older games.

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

How did you arrive to these numbers?

I divided the gross sales (as strongly implied by the first dividend of ~$193 per Fig share for revenue generated through the end of October) by the potential unit sales you threw out there to arrive at a back of the envelope average selling price for each level. This is not coming out of anyone’s ass, it’s coming out of Fig’s dividend announcement and Obsidian’s offering document. If they’re lying, Feargus is going to prison for fraud.

Gross revenue / units sold = ASP

$4.5 million gross/150,000 = $30 ASP
$4.5 million gross/100,000 = $45 ASP

We know the game generated roughly $4.5 million in gross sales through the end of October, again unless Feargus is defrauding his investors. If most of those sales were in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and wealthy Northern Europe, (Obsidian’s poll would suggest roughly 80%), where the game has sold for roughly $37.50 at its greatest discount (I know, it was actually discounted more heavily—correction in next post) to $50 at full price, it’s hard to see how they get to 150,000 buyers (potentially bringing the total players up to 200,000 with backers, slacker backers, and those backer tiers who got multiple copies). There would simply be a lot more money.

If we assume an ASP at the midpoint for countries with strong regional pricing, that means roughly 80% of buyers paid around $43.75 (and this assumes Fig backers don’t get any extra money from people who buy the deluxe or obsidian editions, which sounds wrong to me, but then again Feargus is a sneaky prick).

100,000 units at an average of $43.75 brings us to gross sales of $4,375,000 (this would only be the 80% of buyers mentioned above), so the 25,000 from the rest of the world would’ve had to pay an average price of roughly $5. Strikes me as low, but it brings you to 125,000.

Given the actual prices in the extremely developed world, Deadfire would’ve had to gross substantially more than $4.5 million to sell anywhere near 200,000 copies, even including backers. Based on what they’ve disbursed to Fig backers, the only way that’s possible is if Fig/Obsidian are committing a crime.

 

[Parabalus]

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

In other words the 100k figure is coming out of someone's ass but it's too late to tell whose ass it was exactly?

How is it someones's ass when they know the sales-->dividends formula, explicitly in the fig investor agreement?

See above post for breakdown

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Far as I'm concerned, the biggest draw of isometric view is that it offers infinitely superior exploration to 3D. Your entire focus can be on making levels that are fun to walk around and pleasant to look at. Combined with fog of war it can make even the most dull map interesting to explore. With 3D you just don't get to do that, stuff has to be geographically feasible.

 

[AwesomeButton]

I divided the gross sales (as strongly implied by the first dividend of ~$193 per Fig share for revenue generated through the end of October) by the potential unit sales you threw out there to arrive at a back of the envelope average selling price for each level. This is not coming out of anyone’s ass, it’s coming out of Fig’s dividend announcement and Obsidian’s offering document. If they’re lying, Feargus is going to prison for fraud.

Gross revenue / units sold = ASP

$4.5 million gross/150,000 = $30 ASP
$4.5 million gross/100,000 = $45 ASP

We know the game generated roughly $4.5 million in gross sales through the end of October, again unless Feargus is defrauding his investors. If most of those sales were in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and wealthy Northern Europe, (Obsidian’s poll would suggest roughly 80%), where the game has sold for roughly $37.50 at its greatest discount to $50 at full price, it’s hard to see how they get to 150,000 buyers (potentially bringing the total players up to 200,000 with backers, slacker backers, and those backer tiers who got multiple copies). There would simply be a lot more money.

If we assume an ASP at the midpoint for countries with strong regional pricing, that means roughly 80% of buyers paid around $43.75 (and this assumes Fig backers don’t get any extra money from people who buy the deluxe or obsidian editions, which sounds wrong to me, but then again Feargus is a sneaky prick).

100,000 units at an average of $43.75 brings us to gross sales of $4,375,000 (this would only be the 80% of buyers mentioned above), so the 25,000 from the rest of the world would’ve had to pay an average price of roughly $5. Strikes me as low, but it brings you to 125,000.

Given the actual prices in the extremely developed world, Deadfire would’ve had to gross substantially more than $4.5 million to sell anywhere near 200,000 copies, even including backers. Based on what they’ve disbursed to Fig backers, the only way that’s possible is if Fig/Obsidian are committing a crime.

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

In other words the 100k figure is coming out of someone's ass but it's too late to tell whose ass it was exactly?

How is it someones's ass when they know the sales-->dividends formula, explicitly in the fig investor agreement?

See above post for breakdown

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

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

How did you arrive to these numbers?

I divided the gross sales (as strongly implied by the first dividend of ~$193 per Fig share for revenue generated through the end of October) by the potential unit sales you threw out there to arrive at a back of the envelope average selling price for each level. This is not coming out of anyone’s ass, it’s coming out of Fig’s dividend announcement and Obsidian’s offering document. If they’re lying, Feargus is going to prison for fraud.

Gross revenue / units sold = ASP

$4.5 million gross/150,000 = $30 ASP
$4.5 million gross/100,000 = $45 ASP

We know the game generated roughly $4.5 million in gross sales through the end of October, again unless Feargus is defrauding his investors. If most of those sales were in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and wealthy Northern Europe, (Obsidian’s poll would suggest roughly 80%), where the game has sold for roughly $37.50* (corrected below) at its greatest discount to $50 at full price, it’s hard to see how they get to 150,000 buyers (potentially bringing the total players up to 200,000 with backers, slacker backers, and those backer tiers who got multiple copies). There would simply be a lot more money.

If we assume an ASP at the midpoint for countries with strong regional pricing, that means roughly 80% of buyers paid around $43.75 (and this assumes Fig backers don’t get any extra money from people who buy the deluxe or obsidian editions, which sounds wrong to me, but then again Feargus is a sneaky prick).

100,000 units at an average of $43.75 brings us to gross sales of $4,375,000 (this would only be the 80% of buyers mentioned above), so the 25,000 from the rest of the world would’ve had to pay an average price of roughly $5. Strikes me as low, but it brings you to 125,000.

Given the actual prices in the extremely developed world, Deadfire would’ve had to gross substantially more than $4.5 million to sell anywhere near 200,000 copies, even including backers. Based on what they’ve disbursed to Fig backers, the only way that’s possible is if Fig/Obsidian are committing a crime.

Edit: looks like it’s been discounted as low as $33.50. So I should’ve used $41.75 as the midpoint. That’s $4,175,000 for 100,000, so the other 25,000 units from the rest of the world could’ve sold for an average of $13, which is more reasonable, but still seems pretty low. Even so, that only gets you to 125,000 units.

AwesomeButton there are a lot of ways to get to 200,000 odd players on steam, but there are only so many ways for the game to gross $4.5 million.

 

[Roguey]

Far as I'm concerned, the biggest draw of isometric view is that it offers infinitely superior exploration to 3D. Your entire focus can be on making levels that are fun to walk around and pleasant to look at. Combined with fog of war it can make even the most dull map interesting to explore. With 3D you just don't get to do that, stuff has to be geographically feasible.

Careful now, lest you spark a DraQ-esque "clearing the black isn't really exploration" debate.

 

[Parabalus]

How did you arrive to these numbers?

I divided the gross sales (as strongly implied by the first dividend of ~$193 per Fig share for revenue generated through the end of October) by the potential unit sales you threw out there to arrive at a back of the envelope average selling price for each level. This is not coming out of anyone’s ass, it’s coming out of Fig’s dividend announcement and Obsidian’s offering document. If they’re lying, Feargus is going to prison for fraud.

Gross revenue / units sold = ASP

$4.5 million gross/150,000 = $30 ASP
$4.5 million gross/100,000 = $45 ASP

We know the game generated roughly $4.5 million in gross sales through the end of October, again unless Feargus is defrauding his investors. If most of those sales were in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and wealthy Northern Europe, (Obsidian’s poll would suggest roughly 80%), where the game has sold for roughly $37.50* (corrected below) at its greatest discount to $50 at full price, it’s hard to see how they get to 150,000 buyers (potentially bringing the total players up to 200,000 with backers, slacker backers, and those backer tiers who got multiple copies). There would simply be a lot more money.

If we assume an ASP at the midpoint for countries with strong regional pricing, that means roughly 80% of buyers paid around $43.75 (and this assumes Fig backers don’t get any extra money from people who buy the deluxe or obsidian editions, which sounds wrong to me, but then again Feargus is a sneaky prick).

100,000 units at an average of $43.75 brings us to gross sales of $4,375,000 (this would only be the 80% of buyers mentioned above), so the 25,000 from the rest of the world would’ve had to pay an average price of roughly $5. Strikes me as low, but it brings you to 125,000.

Given the actual prices in the extremely developed world, Deadfire would’ve had to gross substantially more than $4.5 million to sell anywhere near 200,000 copies, even including backers. Based on what they’ve disbursed to Fig backers, the only way that’s possible is if Fig/Obsidian are committing a crime.

Edit: looks like it’s been discounted as low as $33.50. So I should’ve used $41.75 as the midpoint. That’s $4,175,000 for 100,000, so the other 25,000 units from the rest of the world could’ve sold for an average of $13, which is more reasonable, but still seems pretty low. Even so, that only gets you to 125,000 units.

AwesomeButton there are a lot of ways to get to 200,000 odd players on steam, but there are only so many ways for the game to get to gross $4.5 million.

Yeah, the key thing is we know how much little money the game made, how many of those copies were full price vs discounted is irrelevant.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Honestly, it's a pointless conversation. We have two numbers that can be confirmed: One is Fig revenue, and the other is 203k Steam players from Arstechnica leak 4 months ago. To figure out everythinge else we have to arbitrarily adjust average price and arbitrarily adjust the number of copies that don't get counted as revenue, until both of our confirmed numbers start fitting together. That's not data, that's just speculation.

In the end number of units moved is not relevant, revenue is what matters. $4 million in 6 months means that Deadfire bombed as fuck. And we already knew that anyways.

edit:

Parabalus beat me to it.

 

[AwesomeButton]

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.

 

[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?

 

[AwesomeButton]

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?

 

[VentilatorOfDoom]

stop talking about fraud, what you guys are forgetting is that there were additional costs that weren't forseeable when Fergus hired his dog and several in-laws, you have to subtract this from the sales

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Right, one thing we are missing is that VE takes a cut.

 

[BEvers]

$4 million in 6 months means that Deadfire bombed as fuck.

Based on Fig's sample calculation, Obsidian's share of base game revenues should be $2.66 million, not including backer donations and revenue from DLC and the season pass. The Fig revenue share was calculated on the assumptions that the game had a total budget of $14 million, with $2.25 million provided by Fig investors.

It's plausible that the calculations were deliberately using an inflated budget to decrease the share of the investors, but I doubt it was very far off. When Fargo gave BT4's budget at over 10 million, he said that they had to spend that much to compete with Larian and Obsidian, who were making games with "10 to 15 million" budgets.

 

[AwesomeButton]

I'm not familiar with the subject matter, but what other costs are factored in before the $4.5 million figure is reached?