Pathfinder: Kingmaker sales and the single-player real-time-with-pause ceiling

[JarlFrank]

It's not even about the US, there are places in the US which are less ridiculously expensive than Commiefornia (like... about 99% of the rest of the US, excepting maybe New York) and yet almost all the game devs have their studios there. Why? Why not move one state over and have a studio there, paying only half the cost in rent and wages?

 

[AwesomeButton]

It's not even about the US, there are places in the US which are less ridiculously expensive than Commiefornia (like... about 99% of the rest of the US, excepting maybe New York) and yet almost all the game devs have their studios there. Why? Why not move one state over and have a studio there, paying only half the cost in rent and wages?

I suppose for the same reason for which they are all virtue signalling their progressive values - blindly imitating Hollywood. Believing games will always be a footnote to movies, and hoping to jump ship to movies.

 

[aweigh]

The issue with coastal states versus "flyover country" is a big one that goes beyond wanting to be in the movies, tho.

The term "flyover country" itself is wildly outrageous.

 

[AwesomeButton]

All those voice actors, musicians and 2d, 3d artists are looking to live in california because they want to work in games, and not in movies? Most of them could move to a place in the central states and work remotely if they were satisfied with games. And live like kings there with the salaries they would be making

 

[BEvers]

They're probably founding companies in California because a huge portion of the available programming talent lives in California. It might not be so easy to lure people to Idaho or Oklahoma with a pitch of "we'll pay you half as much, but you'll only be spending half as much either, and Boise is basically just a cooler version of LA".

 

[AwesomeButton]

Oh, programmers...! Back when games were being made by real men, id Software was based in Texas

 

[Spectacle]

It's not even about the US, there are places in the US which are less ridiculously expensive than Commiefornia (like... about 99% of the rest of the US, excepting maybe New York) and yet almost all the game devs have their studios there. Why? Why not move one state over and have a studio there, paying only half the cost in rent and wages?

Sierra tried that. They set up in a small town in the mountains where you could easily afford a big house on a game dev salary. Then as the company grew they hired more people and housing prices went straight up since the sierra employees could easily outbid the locals. Then Activision bought Sierra and shut the studio down, and all the Sierra devs were stuck owning houses that were now worth less than the mortgage, and with no other tech jobs available inside commuting range. Great fun for everyone involved.

 

[deuxhero]

Most of Texas still works.

 

[AwesomeButton]

But you no longer need to be in commuting range in order to do a programming job for your product owner.

It's not programmers that are the big issue, the greatest part of a game's budget goes to paying for assets - art and sound.

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[Fairfax]

Lol, Roguey, do you even hear yourself. Excluding evidence that doesn't support our theory

It's not excluding evidence. PoE was the first, and no other rtwp RPG has been able to exceed or even match its week one sales, not unlike what happened with Grimrock and other blobbers.

That's an Obsidian problem, since they made 3/4 titles you used as evidence.

I agree even more after the edit.

I don’t understand why more of this work doesn’t get outsourced to India. They have a massive software industry and 50 million near native English speakers who’ll work for ten cents on the dollar. For all of Feargus’ heartlessness as a manager, the guy clearly has no understanding of business. Kickstarter is the perfect platform for companies that know how to stick to a budget. Yet they never seem to say, “okay, we’ve got $4 million in preorders, let’s make it last.” Instead they light that money on fire by paying California wages. It’s absurd.

Outsourcing to coding sweatshops is becoming much more common, but the most prominent examples are good arguments against it. SF5 and MVCI were extensively ridiculed for their characters and animations, which were outsourced to Streamline Studios, the biggest gamedev sweatshop at the moment. Feargus used their services for PoE, outsourcing environments and using their project management tools. I believe they were hired for AW as well.

 

[Azarkon]

its kind of snowball effect. Its easier to scoop programmers from another company in same area than it is to hire someone in some weird remote location.
Programmers in kwa seem to buy a house/expensive apartment early in their career(debt++). You wont convince them to move.

This means that you want acquire young talent. Hence university vicinity is crucial.
This is how large/mid companies should operate at least. Why small ones do it makes little sense. I suspect 'cool' factor.

Basically, yeah.

Why does Silicon Valley exist? Why don't technology companies just move to Nebraska and attract talent there? The answer is that nobody would go there because they wouldn't have any other opportunities, once they got there. It's a mutually reinforcing mechanism, which concentrates talent and companies in the same region, because both employers and employees find it easier to get what they want when they go to that region. Once the snow ball starts, it just keeps on going.

The same applies to game art and music talent, the bulk of which is also concentrated in California, because that's where the industry is.

At this stage, it's impossible to change without a coordinated, concerted push to start a bunch of companies in another region, to get a separate snow ball going there.

Like it or not, California is the heart of game development in the US.

 

[Frozen]

Its not peak even if RTwP is cancer gameplay wise.
Writing a story that is not your typical 5yo "you are a chosen group of adventurers on a quest to stop the evil guy with sinister laughter and a mustache who is evil because muwahahaha" would be a good start.
Other thing to improve upon would be art direction. All these games look like clones of one another, just cheap, visually uninspiring, ugly ( read: Wasteland 2)
You can and SHOULD be visually appealing in an isometric game with good artists drawing beautiful 2D bkg.
Getting out of sword&sorcery setting or twist it a little would also help.
All in all you could still make good money out of this retro approach but you should try to bring something new and BETTER to the table, not constantly trying to recreate 20yo game (BG)

 

[Mech]

and a testament to the strength of the Pathfinder setting and ruleset, .

I'd be willing to bet money that less than 5% of the people playing the game bought it based on any sort of brand recognition

I had absolutely no idea that pathfinder even existed before September 27th. It grabbed my attention because it was basically Baldurs Gate 3 in spirit.

 

[Tigranes]

It's not even about the US, there are places in the US which are less ridiculously expensive than Commiefornia (like... about 99% of the rest of the US, excepting maybe New York) and yet almost all the game devs have their studios there. Why? Why not move one state over and have a studio there, paying only half the cost in rent and wages?

I suppose for the same reason for which they are all virtue signalling their progressive values - blindly imitating Hollywood. Believing games will always be a footnote to movies, and hoping to jump ship to movies.

It's a lot more prosaic, and a lot less wacko-world than that. Even well into the 00's, it remained true that software talent is overwhelmingly concentrated in a few select expensive areas, and that the managerial and logistical challenges to remote teams remained considerable. (Remember how unusual it was to see Larian was to open up all those global studios, outside AAAs that had to start doing it once they needed literally 300 people on a project?) Hell, just look at how Codex often treats games made outside US/Japan with automatic disdain and/or assumptions of superjankery.

And there's always inertia involved - if it made sense for developers to move to California & for companies to stay in California until, say, 2005, then it takes a few years for everyone to realise the tide has shifted, and then it takes a few years for people who have their families or are otherwise committed to the area to move on / die out / become a minority. Even as many Silicon Valley players openly talk about leaving the Bay Area now, far more people just talk about leaving than actually leave, and you will still see young startups feel like they have to be around the area (even if that might no longer be quite true).

One great thing about stuff like Underrail and Pathfinder is that we are starting to see games made outside American can make an impact.

 

[Roguey]

If your thesis is right, these games should NEVER be made in America. They require a ton of labor and a 300,000 unit ceiling means that you can’t really make an old school RPG that’s both packed with content and profitable. Owlcat’s model is the way to go: hire a bunch of Russians and bring in one American writer like MCA as a branching narrative consultant.

There’s a reason Kingmaker looks to be two or three times the size of Deadfire.

All reports indicate that Kingmaker devolves into a complete mess after chapter 3, so they didn't even have the budget to do it right in Russia.

 

[Roguey]

That's an Obsidian problem, since they made 3/4 titles you used as evidence.

The only other recent rtwp examples out are "Never heard of 'em" indies like Serpent in the Staglands and Tower of Time and shovelware trash like Sword Coast Legends.

 

[Fairfax]

That's an Obsidian problem, since they made 3/4 titles you used as evidence.

The only other recent rtwp examples out are "Never heard of 'em" indies like Serpent in the Staglands and Tower of Time and shovelware trash like Sword Coast Legends.

That's the point. Obsidian alone makes up for most of subgenre's releases (and all of its high profile failures) in the last few years, so the "evidence" doesn't say much. If someone made a good "triple-I" BG3 and it flopped, there would be no doubt, but that's not what happened.

 

[holla_cabezas_de_mierda]

We’ll see. Didn’t PK spend most of its first week at number one on Steam? Even now it’s number ten on global top sellers. Deadfire vanished from that list in like a day, not sure if Tyranny was ever on it.

I suspect that the ceiling for these games is somewhere between Deadfire/Tyranny and POE. The issue is that Pillars didn’t just capture a huge amount of pent up demand, I think it also put a lot of those players in isometric RTWP limbo. Not that they disliked it, because outside of this place it still seems very well-regarded. But POE was a huge time commitment that was not very engaging, especially before the expansions. There are about a million people who bought the game, played it for too long to return, and then just kinda lost interest. When they look at a new isometric RTWP RPG, many of them probably say to themselves, “I should finish Pillars before I buy another one of these,” and then they never do either.

Like Roguey I enjoyed POE 3.0 just fine, and I loved a lot of things about Tyranny (Deadfire I’m having a limbo experience with—okay for what it is, but stuck at 25 hours in since June because I just don’t feel compelled to boot up the game).

Kingmaker is way, way better, though. Just playing it makes me feel a hundred times more disappointed with Obsidian. I hope that will matter to its sales because it actually scratches the nostalgia itch in a way none of these others have done.

One thing: it’s not single player RTWP that imposes the ceiling, it’s the isometric perspective. NWN2 and DAO both sold millions of units. Real time with pause is not the problem, an RPG that looks like a strategy game is. Throw in an over the shoulder camera and some cutscenes and sales would go through the roof. Of course, that shit is expensive.

If your thesis is right, these games should NEVER be made in America. They require a ton of labor and a 300,000 unit ceiling means that you can’t really make an old school RPG that’s both packed with content and profitable. Owlcat’s model is the way to go: hire a bunch of Russians and bring in one American writer like MCA as a branching narrative consultant.

There’s a reason Kingmaker looks to be two or three times the size of Deadfire.

Edit 2: old school RPGs are like sneakers or textiles—you have to be crazy to manufacture them in a first world country.

as far as I can tell PK is still 3ed on the USA best sellers list. Its been near the top of the list almost 3 weeks, selling for 40 dollars too. (I know you were talking about the global list)

 

[holla_cabezas_de_mierda]

It's not even about the US, there are places in the US which are less ridiculously expensive than Commiefornia (like... about 99% of the rest of the US, excepting maybe New York) and yet almost all the game devs have their studios there. Why? Why not move one state over and have a studio there, paying only half the cost in rent and wages?

I never understood this either. Phoenix/scottsdale is like 4 hours by car from Los Angeles and way cheaper. Also I prefer scottsdale and arizona to Los Angeles anyway, but that's another story

edit: also Las vegas, which is like 3 hours by car. Also prefer vegas to LA, unless I can afford santa monica or some place like that

 

[rusty_shackleford]

It's not even about the US, there are places in the US which are less ridiculously expensive than Commiefornia (like... about 99% of the rest of the US, excepting maybe New York) and yet almost all the game devs have their studios there. Why? Why not move one state over and have a studio there, paying only half the cost in rent and wages?

The employers don't care about their employees, and the employees are willing to drive 12 hours a work to brag about their salary when they spend 80% of it on renting a cardboard box.

 

[cruelio]

Sadly until we figure out how to make robots that can farm corn and frack for oil flyover states will have to continue to exist. Until then lets try not to pretend the majority of people who put in the time and money to acquire a specialized skillset want to move to the country's opium-addicted shitholes of despair, where countless open jobs go unfilled because everyone has a criminal history or can't pass a drug screen.

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[holla_cabezas_de_mierda]

Sadly until we figure out how to make robots that can farm corn and frack for oil flyover states will have to continue to exist. Until then lets try not to pretend the majority of people who put in the time and money to acquire a specialized skillset want to move to the country's opium-addicted shitholes of despair, where countless open jobs go unfilled because everyone has a criminal history or can't pass a drug screen.

scottsdale is nothing like you describe, in fact its nicer than SF/LA and I grew up in SF and lived there for more than 30 years. Its also not far from LA so you could drive there on the weekend and get your fill of nignog culture and bums shitting on themselves while wasting thousands of dollars all you wanted

 

[laclongquan]

Lots of programmer work for team leader/owner.

Team leader/owner need to do sale works, ie finding investors who pay you upfront (to pay for IT wages) to do games.

The closer, geographical speaking, the team leaders to the investors, the easier it is for them to have projects.

Investors live and work in big city, example SF.

So the team leaders put up studios and office in nearby cities (because of rents). See Silicon Valley and Palo Alto the early history of IT wave.

The bigger the metropolitan area, see SF bay area and Tokyo.
The more software studios situated in the border of them.

/2cent.