Interview Feargus Urquhart and Fredrik Wester on the Pillars of Eternity distribution deal

[Shevek]

I backed the game because I wanted (1) a 90s era cRPG updated for today and (2) to see a highly visible game succeed while avoiding the publisher model. The game was pitched to backers with these two points in mind. Whether or not they "need" this is irrelevant. A publisher should not be a part of the equation.

 

[Infinitron]

I backed the game because I wanted (1) a 90s era cRPG updated for today and (2) to avoid the publisher model. The game was pitched to backers with these two points in mind. Whether or not they "need" this is irrelevant. A publisher should not be a part of the equation.

This game was pitched with just the first point in mind. Unlike inXile and others, Obsidian was never vocal about badmouthing publishers or saying they would never work with them

Anyway, this isn't the "publisher model". The publisher model == publisher funds the game and reaps all the profits. That isn't the case here.

 

[Xor]

What exactly is the problem with this if it doesn't change the direction of the game at all and in fact gives Obsidian more money to spend on development since they don't need to invest in making the boxed copies of the game themselves? I can't see any kind of a downside to this.

 

[suejak]

There's nothing glaringly obvious about it at all. It's a masterstroke of marketing and PR that manages to mask all the obvious "problems" of budgeting for game development with a big smilie face and a thumbs-up.

Yeah, the deal with Paradox is not the traditional publisher model. That's great and a big plus. Obsidian keeps intellectual property rights and presumably more profits.

Paradox is a "distributor". They handle "non-development tasks". Obsidian didn't run out of money; they just don't want to use their Kickstarter budget on Kickstarter promises. It's high-level wordplay and concept manipulation.

Anyway, nothing EVILLLLL here, just smart PR. Obsidian ran out of money and needed help, but they played it off like some neato partnership.

 

[Infinitron]

There's nothing glaringly obvious about it at all. It's a masterstroke of marketing and PR that manages to mask all the obvious "problems" of budgeting for game development with a big smilie face and a thumbs-up.

Yeah, the deal with Paradox is not the traditional publisher model. That's great and a big plus. Obsidian keeps intellectual property rights and presumably more profits.

Paradox is a "distributor". They handle "non-development tasks". Obsidian didn't run out of money; they just don't want to use their Kickstarter budget on Kickstarter promises. It's high-level wordplay and concept manipulation.

Anyway, nothing EVILLLLL here, just smart PR. Obsidian ran out of money and needed help, but they played it off like some neato partnership.

Messages:
1,337

That's so ironic.

 

[Morality Games]

There's nothing glaringly obvious about it at all. It's a masterstroke of marketing and PR that manages to mask all the obvious "problems" of budgeting for game development with a big smilie face and a thumbs-up.

Yeah, the deal with Paradox is not the traditional publisher model. That's great and a big plus. Obsidian keeps intellectual property rights and presumably more profits.

Paradox is a "distributor". They handle "non-development tasks". Obsidian didn't run out of money; they just don't want to use their Kickstarter budget on Kickstarter promises. It's high-level wordplay and concept manipulation.

Anyway, nothing EVILLLLL here, just smart PR. Obsidian ran out of money and needed help, but they played it off like some neato partnership.

I'm not say that it is impossible Obsidian ran out of money, but I'm not sure it is inevitable either. The organizational structures and connections of a publishing company are a useful thing to have.

 

[Tigranes]

The only real judgment of this relationship will come after the game's release, when we can do some postmortem of Paradox's influence, whether Q&A / distribution / marketing was botched, whether Obsidian could not do what they wanted with aspects of development, etc. If it works, great - Kickstarter is helping forge more equitable and laudable publisher relationships. If it doesn't, then the question remains unanswered.

The only way you can say this is a bad thing and betrays KS principles at this point in time, is if you (1) believe this is a conspiracy by Pdox/Obsid to mask a bad contract as a good one, or (2) think that any publisher relationship is inherently evil. Both points don't even need debunking, they are obviously irrational.

Some kind of distributing partnership was inevitable. This seems slightly more involved than the bare minimum, so that will be what we need to make a judgment on depending on how it plays out. In terms of what they've announced so far, everything seems reasonably sensible - Obsidian doesn't have a large in-house Q&A team and has no distribution capacities, and negligible human resources for marketing.

 

[BlackAdderBG]

 

[Tigranes]

Better than

 

[Sensuki]

Cut of the profits makes sense as that allows for Paradox to provide ongoing patches

 

[a cut of domestic sheep prime]

So what where the bugs in South Park again? Or is this guy talking out of his ass just to be edgy? I never encountered any bugs during my playthrough. It didn't even crash that I can recall. Unusual for a modern game - let alone an Obsidian game.

 

[Curious_Tongue]

Might help if they need a loan or something to have a publisher.

Banks and investors might like things like that.

 

[Duraframe300]

With Paradox on board, is more money being given to the project?

Pillars of Eternity is still being funded solely by the donations given by the community and the scope hasn’t changed, with Obsidian still 100% in charge of development and every single penny raised by the community going toward development.

So, please STFU.

 

[suejak]

Damn, take an accounting class if this is new to you.

No, this is not about getting extra cash directly from Paradox via longboat delivery service. It's about indirectly getting funds by having Paradox cover Obsidian's distribution, marketing, QA, and most hilariously Kickstarter pledge rewards.

It's creative accounting and PR speak.

 

[Arkeus]

Yeah Paradox isn't funding or directing our development in any way. They're handling things that would be very hard/time consuming for us: physical fulfillment and general distribution. Over half of our backers are in Europe. I'm not sure why anyone would want us to spend their money and our time personally handling fulfillment. It was heartwarming to see Stoic figuring out how to get thousands of Banner Saga posters out of their house and shipped out to people but that's not really what developers are built to do.

Ok, let's put this talk to rest.

 

[suejak]

There are a few ways to fund things. One is a big fat check signed by Alex Trebek. Another is cost-reduction.

 

[Infinitron]

I should feel bad for buying vegetables in a supermarket. If I wasn't incompetent at budgeting, I would have enough money to grow them myself

 

[Tigranes]

Damn, take an accounting class if this is new to you.

No, this is not about getting extra cash directly from Paradox via longboat delivery service. It's about indirectly getting funds by having Paradox cover Obsidian's distribution, marketing, QA, and most hilariously Kickstarter pledge rewards.

It's creative accounting and PR speak.

That's exactly what they're doing, except it's not 'creative accounting' (it's, like, a basic business and logistics action) and it's not 'PR speak' (they, uh, explained exactly what they are doing, and you're basically repeating it).

Obsidian is paying Pdox in a share of future profits in order to contract them for certain logistical aspects, because they feel that this is cheaper, or at least delivers those logistical solutions better, than handling it internally using their KS money. OH NO! What if they hired 50 kids to box up the physical copies instead of Chris Avellone doing them and then paid them in 0.00001% of the sales? OH GOD

 

[suejak]

All of this is fine. It's just ridiculous to act like it's any different from getting a pot of gold or any other compromise made because you don't have any money.

I'm not saying Obsidian is incompetent; I'm saying they're getting a very valuable injection of funds from a publisher.

It's also absurd to imply that this is what Obsidian was planning to do all along because it's "standard logistics stuff" similar to buying vegetables at the supermarket.

We make the development decisions, we market the game, and we don't have to answer to anyone but you – our fans.

 

[Delterius]

And we're opinionated people, we're going to come back with tons of opinions. We have a QA team of eighteen people who're going to play the game for weeks and weeks and give their feedback."

I have a hard time believing this, looking at every single title they released so far.
They picked the developer who release buggy unpolished mess who aren't worth playing until heavily patched and DLCed.

If anything, Paradox and Obsidian are like two obese buddies coaching each other to cut off fast food from their lives. Except that was all actually about unfinished buggy releases.

 

[Tigranes]

All of this is fine. It's just ridiculous to act like it's any different from getting a pot of gold or any other compromise made because you don't have any money.

I'm not saying Obsidian is incompetent; I'm saying they're getting a very valuable injection of funds from a publisher.

It's also absurd to imply that this is what Obsidian was planning to do all along because it's "standard logistics stuff" similar to buying vegetables at the supermarket.

We make the development decisions, we market the game, and we don't have to answer to anyone but you – our fans.

Sure, I can agree with all that. I wouldn't argue that Obsidian had to do this or that they clearly always planned to do it. And sure, it is a valuable injection of funds in indirect form from a publisher. All agreed. I just don't see what the hoolaballoo is, since it sounds like a pretty sensible deal to me. I would be concerned if they were trying to box up all the copies themselves or something stupid.

 

[kazgar]

All of this is fine. It's just ridiculous to act like it's any different from getting a pot of gold or any other compromise made because you don't have any money.

I'm not saying Obsidian is incompetent; I'm saying they're getting a very valuable injection of funds from a publisher.

It's also absurd to imply that this is what Obsidian was planning to do all along because it's "standard logistics stuff" similar to buying vegetables at the supermarket.

We make the development decisions, we market the game, and we don't have to answer to anyone but you – our fans.

Sure, I can agree with all that. I wouldn't argue that Obsidian had to do this or that they clearly always planned to do it. And sure, it is a valuable injection of funds in indirect form from a publisher. All agreed. I just don't see what the hoolaballoo is, since it sounds like a pretty sensible deal to me. I would be concerned if they were trying to box up all the copies themselves or something stupid.

I don't think Sawyer's delicate hands could handle assembling all those boxes, paper cuts could mean the end of any chance of a sequel and further improvement on RPG greatness, its best this it outsourced.

 

[Duraframe300]

It's also absurd to imply that this is what Obsidian was planning to do all along because it's "standard logistics stuff" similar to buying vegetables at the supermarket.

We make the development decisions, we market the game, and we don't have to answer to anyone but you – our fans.

All of that is still (partially) true. They make all the final decisions, they marketed the game and still do somewhat and they don't have to answer to anyone. As stated by Obsidian themselves they can also tell Paradox to fuck right off if they don't agree.

I agree it wasn't planned from the beginning. But, so are a lot of things during a games development, even Eternitys.

 

[Copper]

One thing I really like about Paradox beside their CK2 and EU4 is their trailers. Their CK2 sins trailers and the Jazzy boats trailers were pretty good.

Also since Paradox is making an RPG game, maybe they asked for Obsidian's expertise at making RPGs or something.

Delicious:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdzrpbB2fw8

"It's a metaphor," explained Quintin Smith, ex-Rock Paper Shotgun writer and author of the trailers. "In an ironic play on our perceptions, the King is a manifestation of all of us, while his servants represent the ruling elite. That their positions are reversed is a reflection of these modern times. The trailers are actually themed around the seven deadly sins, for reasons too scholarly to go into here, but we start with wroth. That's the old English word for wrath. That's the kind of thing we know, here at Paradox. We're very high-functioning."

 

[dukeofwhales]

Damn, take an accounting class if this is new to you.

No, this is not about getting extra cash directly from Paradox via longboat delivery service. It's about indirectly getting funds by having Paradox cover Obsidian's distribution, marketing, QA, and most hilariously Kickstarter pledge rewards.

It's creative accounting and PR speak.

That's exactly what they're doing, except it's not 'creative accounting' (it's, like, a basic business and logistics action) and it's not 'PR speak' (they, uh, explained exactly what they are doing, and you're basically repeating it).

Obsidian is paying Pdox in a share of future profits in order to contract them for certain logistical aspects, because they feel that this is cheaper, or at least delivers those logistical solutions better, than handling it internally using their KS money. OH NO! What if they hired 50 kids to box up the physical copies instead of Chris Avellone doing them and then paid them in 0.00001% of the sales? OH GOD

If this is what suejak is suggesting it is, Obsidian is not allocating the 15% [or whatever they budgeted for] of money raised in the KS towards fulfilling physical pledges, some marketing and some QA. Paradox takes that 15% on as a risk, in return for x% of the profits. Obsidian now have an extra $600,000 to spend on developing the game, which allows for a few months delay on the original budget, or 10 additional staff for the final 6 months of development or whatever. Obsidian gets more money, Paradox takes on a (relatively small) risk, all money from the KS is now going towards game dev instead of 85% of it, and all is hopefully well. Unless Paradox looks at the game in 2 months time and says 'well we put a lot of money on the line for this so we're going to need to you to add romances' then it won't be a problem. Obsidian is pretty clear that this isn't the case, plus Obsidian could feasibly tell them to fuck off if it really came to it (no doubt at the cost of QA, lol) because they're not the sole source of funding for the game.