"For a relatively difficult videogame that's exclusively sold on PC and MAC and a genre wherefore only a small percentage of people are interested in, Divinity Original Sin is doing extremely well.
Since 30 June, the game has sold more than a quarter million units and has been in the top 10 sellers for both GOG.com and Steam.
"And it's still early", said Swen Vincke, the game's developer. "The curve is still rising with mouth-to-mouth leading the way. This exceeded all our expectation".
Oldschool and innovative
DOS isn't for everyone. The RPG genre has the need to players to invest tens of hours in the building of their characters.
The two protagonists controlled by the players as they travel through the world of Rivellon have traits and weapons that need to be continually improved.
This allows them to fight stronger and stronger opponents and in the end save the world from doom.
It's very different from series of games like Call of duty which give players instant gratification. This also means the potential public for this genre is small - ~7% of people are interested in RPGs according to the Entertainment Software Association.
This small group of RPG players are also not easily pleased. But Larian, has been working on the Divinity series since 2002 and have been specialising in pleasing these RPG fans. Larian also has a diehard group of fans.
The site Eurogamer has praised the game saying : "I can't stop recommending the game"
The game was praised by the French site Gameblog as being both Oldschool and innovative at the same time. The game has a score of 86% on Metacritic, which is higher than recently released international successes such as Watch Dogs and Wolfenstein : The New Order.
Crowdfunding
At one of the larger sites. Gamespot, the game has been nominated as Game of the Year.
This has confirmed Larian's power as one of the few Belgian game development studios which can export its products and also adds to their autonomy after disbanding their publisher.
The production budget was approximately 3 million euros of which one third from Kickstarter. This has been earned back at least.
the earlier Divinity series were also successful, but the success brought in from DOS is much grander and has had people knocking on Larian's door to buy them.
Swen said :"They've been here to buy us" "we have 'choice-stress' now, but we don't know yet what we will do. First holidays, then we will decide what our next steps will be.'
