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Game News Divinity: Original Sin has sold 160,000 copies, already approaching profitability

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Tags: Divinity: Original Sin; Larian Studios; Swen Vincke

Over at Eurogamer, Swen Vincke speaks candidly about Divinity: Original Sin's commercial reception:

Old-school fantasy role-playing game Divinity: Original Sin is Larian Studios' fastest-selling title ever, the developer has confirmed to Eurogamer.

The £29.99 game launched proper on 30th June after a stint as a Steam Early Access title, and has already shifted 160,000 copies. At the time of publication it was the top-selling game on Steam.

It's already approaching profitability, Larian boss Swen Vincke told Eurogamer. Divinity: Original Sin cost around €4m to make, following a successful Kickstarter that raised just under $1m.

"It's doing pretty well," Vincke said. "We're very happy about it. And to be honest we didn't expect it. We thought it was going to do well but not this well.

"It's definitely the fastest-selling game we've ever published. The last figures I saw we were at 160,000. For us that's pretty good. We're definitely going to break even and hopefully we'll make sufficient profit for our next game."

To work out how much money Larian has made from Divnity so far, it's not as simple as taking the revenue from the game then taking out Valve's standard 30 per cent cut.

For Larian, which as a Belgian studio works in euros, its rule of thumb is to take the dollars generated then half that figure it to arrive at a euro amount. So, if a game makes $100,000, the studio makes €50,000.

Divinity: Original Sin costs $39.99. If it's sold 160,000 copies, that's $6.39m in revenue. Half that and we get €3.19m (£2.5m), which means the project is well on its way to breaking even.

Vincke put Divinity: Original Sin's success down to its Steam Early Access and Kickstarter communities.

"The feedback we received from them was worth its weight in gold," he said. "It's almost a co-development between us and them, because they pointed out things we were doing wrong, and encouraged us to expand on the areas we were doing right. As a result you get a group intelligence applied to a game. It's always much better than a single person."

This, coupled with strong word of mouth, is keeping Divinity at the top of Steam's sales charts, ahead of the likes of DayZ and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.

"It's word of mouth that is driving Original Sin right now," Vincke said. "We were late with our game, working on it until the last day, so we don't even have reviews out there. We have exactly two ads we did with the last of our money. It was definitely not marketing doing it."​

160,000 copies in three days, that's fantastic! We can probably take that as a lower bound on the expected sales of all the other major Kickstarter RPGs that are going to be released over the next year or so. Good times, they are a-coming! Swen also has a bit to say about Larian's plans for the future:

Now that Divinity: Original Sin's success seems secure, what's next for Larian?

Larian is working on a hotfix for the game, as well as its first major patch, which will add new content. There is also content promised to Divinity's Kickstarter backers but cut from the release version of the game that is due to be added in. And then there is ongoing support for the Divinity engine toolkit. "There's still work to be done," Vincke stressed.

But longer term, it seems Larian will take a hard-earned break before brainstorming its next project.

"We sleep and then we're going to have a party and then we're going to sit together and figure out what the next game is," Vincke said.

"Nobody believes us but we really don't have anything planned. This was all in for us. This was part of our plan when we started to go independent, that we'd make the biggest RPG we could with what we had in terms of money, and then we'll see what comes out of it.

"So we went all in. We have to pay back our debts now, because we made a lot of them. It looks like that's going to happen. And then we will see. But for sure we will make a big fuss of whatever it is when we announce it."

Vincke then said he plans to try to obtain the license for a mystery role-playing franchise - but stopped short of saying what it was.

"There was a certain license we tried to get, but they haven't replied to us," he said. "Maybe now they will reply to us! I'm not going to tell you, because that will ruin the chances of me getting it.

"We asked them a couple of months ago, so we'll ask them again now. Maybe they'll be interested. It's in the RPG space, that's for sure.

"If they refuse to answer this time I'm going to put it in the press and then hopefully something will happen. Or I'll launch a Kickstarter and say, this is the game we want to make, but we don't have the license yet. But maybe we can get it this way."
I wonder if they're going to try to make a Dark Eye RPG again.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
So, the game had a 4 million euro budget? 5.5 million dollars? That's actually pretty low! Although going by the formula suggested in the article it's actually 8 million.

ForkTong, does that figure include engine development costs? For example, the budget for Dragon Commander may have offset some of that.
 

Crooked Bee

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Codex 2013 Codex 2014 PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire MCA Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire
I'm really happy the game has such strong word of mouth. Because it's honestly amazing, on a level which, with all due respect, I didn't really expect Larian to achieve.

In a way it's good that mainstream reviews come late. Because if they had scored the game too low from day one, that could've influenced the sales negatively despite the word of mouth.
 

Perkel

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Deserved.

Also with this game and few others we may stop using "old school design" and use "good design" like it should be used compared to "shit design" of many RPGs.
 

t

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I'm so happy that my prediction of DOS exchanging top 1 place with some unfinished buggy arma 2 mod day after release is wrong.
 

MicoSelva

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Good that D:OS is being talked about, and well too, the more copies Larian sells at a full price, the more time they can dedicate to making that Greatest RPG That Will Trump Them All.

160 000 copies is pretty good, considering none of the major sites have posted their reviews yet. Hopefully the game gets some good scores.
 

himmy

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"There was a certain license we tried to get, but they haven't replied to us," he said. "Maybe now they will reply to us! I'm not going to tell you, because that will ruin the chances of me getting it.

inb4 Larian tries to pull an inXile in getting access to the Ultima franchise.
 

Jaedar

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Project: Eternity Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Pathfinder: Kingmaker
It's pretty funny. They sell 200k copies and will more or less have broken even. AAA games sell 2 million copies and don't break even. Dem budgets man.
 

J_C

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Project: Eternity Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath
It's pretty funny. They sell 200k copies and will more or less have broken even. AAA games sell 2 million copies and don't break even. Dem budgets man.
Worse it they don't break even if they sell four million.

But this is how you make video games. Have a decent sized teams, have a decent budget, and you can break even with 150-200K. And that number is attainable if you do a good game. Hats off to Larian. No go and fix my GOG version, dammit! :x
 

Ramireza

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"There was a certain license we tried to get, but they haven't replied to us," he said. "Maybe now they will reply to us! I'm not going to tell you, because that will ruin the chances of me getting it.

inb4 Larian tries to pull an inXile in getting access to the Ultima franchise.




"There was a certain license we tried to get, but they haven't replied to us," he said. "Maybe now they will reply to us! I'm not going to tell you, because that will ruin the chances of me getting it.

inb4 Larian tries to pull an inXile in getting access to the Ultima franchise.

They bought the Fallout Franchise and will anounce Fallout 4 very soon :D

I have also heard that MCA seaching a house in belgium...
 

Mirage

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I'm really happy for Larian! I was honestly worried for them not breaking even but the community for once didn't disappoint us. Before the sales started, nobody on my steam friends list had this game on their wish list, now 3 have bought it and the others have added it.

Hopefully the good reviews will follow and boost even more the sale figure.

Good job Larian, you created a great game.
 
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Sensuki

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Codex 2014 Serpent in the Staglands Shadorwun: Hong Kong A Beautifully Desolate Campaign
I went to a mate's 27th birthday the other day and a few of his work friends who are casual gamers said they had bought the game on Steam and were loving it. I suppose that's a good sign.
 

Jack Dandy

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Divinity: Original Sin 2
This is just fucking amazing news to hear, I'm so glad for them.

It has so many positives: Rewarding the devs for a great game, exposing this kind of game to hordes of new players who were oblivious before (They thought Skyrim was the epitome of the genre! Hah!), and shows that this kind of title is viable in the modern market as well.
 

Ramireza

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This is just fucking amazing news to hear, I'm so glad for them.

It has so many positives: Rewarding the devs for a great game, exposing this kind of game to hordes of new players who were oblivious before (They thought Skyrim was the epitome of the genre! Hah!), and shows that this kind of title is viable in the modern market as well.



Waaait a minute.... They sold 160k, not 1,6 million.

The Retards will still prefer hike through "vast" worlds flodded with butterflies and respawning bandits using a ebony sword.
 

ZoddGuts

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It's nearing 3 days since release and it's still number 1 seller on Steam. With no big releases for awhile it should give it enough breathing room to sell steadily well.
 
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They have a zippy C++ engine and their art was made to suit the kind of game they were making. So it runs on low end machines and looks great, which means a huge potential audience. It was a professional job all the way.
 

Cyberarmy

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Divinity: Original Sin 2

"There was a certain license we tried to get, but they haven't replied to us," he said. "Maybe now they will reply to us! I'm not going to tell you, because that will ruin the chances of me getting it.

inb4 Larian tries to pull an inXile in getting access to the Ultima franchise.


Or Gothic maybe? If they follow their common pattern about writing that is the closest licence to their "thing" imho. Of course I'll hope (like a fool) for Arcanum.
But since they already got fantasy covered with Divinity, so maybe something sci-fi like Anachronox? Or maybe something totally different like Darksun, Whitewolf, Ravenloft?
 

CrimsonAngel

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Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong
It's nearing 3 days since release and it's still number 1 seller on Steam. With no big releases for awhile it should give it enough breathing room to sell steadily well.

And it's got a very good work of mouth so it can hang in there for some time.
 

Turjan

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It may sound like a stupid question, but is there any non-Kickstarter release trailer I can directly link to? I want to spread the word a bit, but I can't find a link to just a trailer.
 

Drowed

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They deserve all that and more. And with the editor, I'm guessing that D:OS will be their game with the longest "lifeline" until now. When good mods/campaigns arrive, and I'm sure it will, I believe it will maintain the sales going for a while. All the better for them, and for us. :incline:
 

Turjan

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Thanks guys. I'm very happy with how the game turned out.
 

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