Obsidian and inXile acquired by Microsoft

[Roguey]

Who else are winners?
Many like Iron Tower and Stygian Software didn't use Kickstarter at all.

What exactly changed? We can perfectly see in a quote Infinitrone did where Swen summarised that - consolidation is the final answer, as any AA company want to turn in AAA, so again it's the Big Corps who won - they reaped companies who grew up on backers money.
So Big Corps didn't spend a dollar even on that - on support various companies to see which one is good one.

Indies somehow benefited from Kickstarter era too - probably, and only indirectly by enriching enviroment.

In the end it was all in favore of Big Corps lol.

Kickstarter gave us Pathfinder: Kingmaker, Stagland Serpents and Expeditions (which some people here like), will give us Realms Beyond, Copper Dreams, Stygian. Better to have it than not.

And maybe because it costs $50. That's a price of an AAA game on release.

A decade ago. AAA have been $60 on all platforms since Blizzard took the plunge with Diablo 3.

$50 was an insane price point. I don't know if the owners were just desparate to recoup costs asap and assumed the game would sell, or if it was hubris

The graphics and the full voice acting. Though given that D:OS 2 just bumped it to $45 they should have bitten the bullet on that extra $5.

 

[Fenix]

Better to have it than not.

I didn't say that, I said it didn't change anything. AA-companies were consolidated, indies are... dunno.

 

[Roguey]

Better to have it than not.

I didn't say that, I said it didn't change anything. AA-companies were consolidated, indies are... dunno.

Indies are making games they otherwise wouldn't be able to make.

 

[Vault Dweller]

This isn't really the point. Your contention, as I understand, is that it's entirely feasible for there to be three or four RPG studios in the world that release isometric RPGs that consistently sell 500k-1M copies, every year, year after year. Or maybe even more. That only Larian has achieved such sales goals is because all these other guys are fucking it up. It's entirely their fault.

Essentially, yes (whose fault is that new Torment tanked? designers or the competition?) but it's not that simple.

Releasing quality RPGs every year is impossible. They take 3-4 years to make, if not longer. If a company pumps out one RPG a year, it's shit. So far I don't recall a year with more than 2 quality releases. 3 releases if we loosen up the standards a bit. That's $100-150. Not a huge sum. Is there any reason - other than bad or uninspiring design - that prevents more than 100,000 RPG players playing 3 games a year or spending $100-150? Are you inviting me to believe that 9 out of 10 RPG players can play/afford only one RPG a year and once D:OS2 got their money there was nothing left for Deadfire?

...Pillars 2 didn't sell half as much as D:OS 2. It sold a lot less. The reason is saturation which means the winner takes all.

It sold a lot less because it used a very outdated formula and didn't offer anything interesting. It wasn't Obsidian's BG2, it's IWD2.

You keep looking at it from a very odd perspective: "it was made, ergo it must sell a notable amount of copies", completely ignoring the most important question: why would it sell a lot? After playing it for 20 hours I can't answer this question. Can you?

 

[Fenix]

The question is whether they fell behind to a proportionate degree. D:OS 2 may be twice as good as Pillars 2, but Pillars 2 didn't sell half as much as D:OS 2. It sold a lot less. The reason is saturation which means the winner takes all.

Because it doesn't work like that don't be such an accountant-autist.

I remember I saw once some show about music, where some musician explained for usual people what mean quality, he said - take a violin made on a fabric, the cheapest one, it's a good quality and all, used for kids.
Then take a violin that made by master, it cost a lot more, an order of magnitude more - and the quality and just a bit higher.
Then take Stradivari violin - it cost so much more, it's rare, and the quality? It's just a little better then previous.

So get that in your head how it works please.
Even a small increase in quality cost a lot, it's not linear function.

 

[glass blackbird]

I would probably care a lot less about this if it didnt mean the games will be tied to dogshit UWP windows 10 store. even gfwl store was better since it worked ok in wine and didnt reduce performance of games released on it

 

[Infinitron]

You keep looking at it from a very odd perspective: "it was made, ergo it must sell a notable amount of copies", completely ignoring the most important question: why would it sell a lot? After playing it for 20 hours I can't answer this question. Can you?

The obvious answer is "because the first game did". But again, I understand and even agree with arguments that Pillars was an underwhelming release that failed to satisfy many, and that thus the sequel was destined to underperform.

But why 200,000 copies? Why not say, 400,000 copies? That's still pretty low. That's still a lot less than D:OS. Why? These things matter, this is what determines whether you have a viable market or not. The ability to get a certain base amount of sales even for a game that doesn't turn people's dials up to 11. That's what it means when we speak about whether a market is saturated or not.

Essentially, yes

Well, we'll agree to disagree.

 

[Bocian]

Again we're talking about developers who want to break out of the 100k-200k ghetto.

Imagine if they could sell over 6 million.

 

[Latelistener]

And maybe because it costs $50. That's a price of an AAA game on release.

A decade ago. AAA have been $60 on all platforms since Blizzard took the plunge with Diablo 3.

$50 is in the AAA tier no matter how you look at and it's an insane price for an isometric RPG.

Diablo 3 is a different beast since it's an online game. They also had almost no competition back then. Today we have Path of Exile, so no one plays Diablo 3 anymore.

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

Releasing quality RPGs every year is impossible. They take 3-4 years to make, if not longer. If a company pumps out one RPG a year, it's shit. So far I don't recall a year with more than 2 quality releases. 3 releases if we loosen up the standards a bit. That's $100-150. Not a huge sum. Is there any reason - other than bad or uninspiring design - that prevents more than 100,000 RPG players playing 3 games a year or spending $100-150? Are you inviting me to believe that 9 out of 10 RPG players can play/afford only one RPG a year and once D:OS2 got their money there was nothing left for Deadfire?

Really? Three of the best RPGs ever made were pumped out by the same company in the span of two years. Granted, the Fallout engine was in the works for years and PS:T used BioWare’s engine, but so what?

Edit: or four from ‘97 to 2000 if you spot them IWD, which was better than it had any right to be and certainly not shit.

 

[GrainWetski]

$50 is in the AAA tier no matter how you look at and it's an insane price for an isometric RPG.

Diablo 3 is a different beast since it's an online game. They also had almost no competition back then. Today we have Path of Exile, so no one plays Diablo 3 anymore.

Clearly only dumbed down third-person action games are worth 50$.

 

[Tigranes]

This isn't really the point. Your contention, as I understand, is that it's entirely feasible for there to be three or four RPG studios in the world that release isometric RPGs that consistently sell 500k-1M copies, every year, year after year. Or maybe even more. That only Larian has achieved such sales goals is because all these other guys are fucking it up. It's entirely their fault.

Essentially, yes (whose fault is that new Torment tanked? designers or the competition?) but it's not that simple.

Releasing quality RPGs every year is impossible. They take 3-4 years to make, if not longer. If a company pumps out one RPG a year, it's shit. So far I don't recall a year with more than 2 quality releases. 3 releases if we loosen up the standards a bit. That's $100-150. Not a huge sum. Is there any reason - other than bad or uninspiring design - that prevents more than 100,000 RPG players playing 3 games a year or spending $100-150? Are you inviting me to believe that 9 out of 10 RPG players can play/afford only one RPG a year and once D:OS2 got their money there was nothing left for Deadfire?

...Pillars 2 didn't sell half as much as D:OS 2. It sold a lot less. The reason is saturation which means the winner takes all.

It sold a lot less because it used a very outdated formula and didn't offer anything interesting. It wasn't Obsidian's BG2, it's IWD2.

You keep looking at it from a very odd perspective: "it was made, ergo it must sell a notable amount of copies", completely ignoring the most important question: why would it sell a lot? After playing it for 20 hours I can't answer this question. Can you?

But isn't this the crux of the matter? My opinion is that games like Deadfire and WL3 should be expecting 100k, 200k, 300k players. Not 500k, 700k, 1 million. I haven't kept up with all the number crunching and digging by people, but it seemed that Deadfire expected 500k+ numbers, when POE1 should have been understood as an anomaly. Ironically, there are dozens of things Deadfire could have done to become a better RPG, but I'm not sure that would have doubled their sales at all.

I do think that for quality RPGs, it makes sense for studios to say "we will release one every 3-4 years and aim for 100k-300k sales, and budget accordingly." I do think that when studios don't do that, they are using dreams and fantasies and home-run success cases to build their business model.

 

[MajorMace]

Having fond memories of Fargo's kickstarter strategies right now. How it revolved around flaming publishers for being dumbfucks and all. It was already funny since he was a publisher himself some ages ago, but now it's just goddamn hilarious.

 

[Deleted Member 22431]

So in the end Big Coprs is the only winner of Kickstarter era which made a enviroment for appearing small indie studios and middle sized to get more success, and then Big Corps just reap all of them - consolidate them.
That's the eco-system that exist, you can't break out of it.

No, for them nothing has changed. We have only learned that AA companies can't rely on Kickstarter (alone).

We have only learned that AA companies are incompetent. They finally had the opportunity to make the games that they couldn't make and they turned out to be derivative shit.

 

[Roguey]

$50 is in the AAA tier no matter how you look at and it's an insane price for an isometric RPG.

This isn't how people felt in the late 90s and early 00s and there were plenty of 3D games being released back then. Looking at the quality of the graphics, I wouldn't call it insane at all.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown was and XCOM 2 is $60 by the by. People certainly willing to pay the full triple A price for cinematic pseudo-iso strategy games with multiplayer.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

If you handle them badly, they're big enough problems to be relevant factors in the eventual commercial failure, yes.

If you handle anything badly (combat system, interface, writing, design, etc), it will cause big enough problems to be relevant factors in the eventual commercial failure or poor performance. My point is that in the digital age a studio doesn't have to sell to the highest bidder to handle these things well.

2-man studio operating from a basement doesn't. We're talking about developers operating in a AA space. Good luck keeping lights on in 50-man company if your marketing consists of regular Twiter updates.

You can of course do it internally and waste valuable time and resources, or you can outsource it to some schmuck and pray he knows what he is doing. Or you can have proven specialists from your parent corporation handle it for you. Take your pick.

Outsource what though? Talking about design?

Why would I be talking about design in a conversation about marketing?

RPGs were never about cool tech. They are about design, scripting (complex quests and c&c require heavy scripting), and writing.

It's a video game. Tech is always relevant, unless you're planning to showcase your design, scripting and writing in a text game with no graphics.

Just like your many considerable talents once resulted in AoD which I consider the best RPG since Arcanum, and once they resulted in Dungeon Rats which I uninstalled after 30 minutes.

One's a complex RPG that took many years of work, the other is a combat game that was put together in 10 months.

And it would most definitely suck less dick if you could dedicate all those months to working on the game and have menial shit like marketing handled by an outside entity.

 

[Alpan]

The obvious answer is "because the first game did". But again, I understand and even agree with arguments that Pillars was an underwhelming release that failed to satisfy many, and that thus the sequel was destined to underperform.

But why 200,000 copies? Why not say, 400,000 copies? That's still pretty low. That's still a lot less than D:OS. Why? These things matter, this is what determines whether you have a viable market or not. The ability to get a certain base amount of sales even for a game that doesn't turn people's dials up to 11. That's what it means when we speak about whether a market is saturated or not.

While this answer may be considered haram, I think in the case of D:OS vs Pillars co-op is a simple enough explanation. Co-op enables an otherwise good game to leverage word-of-mouth network effect far more effectively than a single-player game, because the recipient of that word-of-mouth gets in on the action. If someone you trust were to tell you that Pillars 2 was a good game you'd probably wait for at least one more person to corroborate that before jumping in. In the case of Divinity however, the recommendation can come with an offer to play the game together, which helps break that barrier.

Also, I think the greater point VD was trying to make is that the game needs to be memorable in some other way than "eh, it's good" to sell. In the D:OS case the potential for absurd stories is a commonplace fact of the game. And I haven't played Kingmaker yet, but from what I'm reading (non-spoilers, that is) the reason it has exceeded expectations is because there's a great sense that it's a genuine product -- someone cared a great deal about isometric RTwP and Pathfinder to make it happen. People seem to have responded to the fact that it's not this sterilized, focus-tested, lab-grown product.

EDIT: And about the "why not 400k?" point, that's just how power law works. Most human affairs are winner-take-all, and the games industry is particularly cutthroat. You simply don't get to sell half as much as Divinity, even if you're more than half as good (or perceived to be so). You'll have to do with selling ten times less.

 

[Jenkem]

First, name ANY studio bought by a huge EA-like publisher that ended up making better games.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monolith_Soft

what do I win

 

[Roguey]

1997: Fallout
1998: Fallout 2
1999: Planescape Torment
2000: Icewind Dale

pure shit, right?

He only considers two of those quality.

 

[Vault Dweller]

The obvious answer is "because the first game did". But again, I understand and even agree with arguments that Pillars was an underwhelming release that failed to satisfy many, and that thus the sequel was destined to underperform.

But why 200,000 copies? Why not say, 400,000 copies? That's still pretty low. That's still a lot less than D:OS. Why? These things matter, this is what determines whether you have a viable market or not. The ability to get a certain base amount of sales even for a game that doesn't turn people's dials up to 11. That's what it means when we speak about whether a market is saturated or not.

You've lost me there. You wonder why a game that offered more of the underwhelming same sold 200k copies and not 400k or 600k copies and present this as the ultimate proof of the market's oversaturation? Why not treat each 100k copies sold as an achievement that must be earned instead of simply expecting it because people like RPGs?

 

[Vulpes]

There's no more comfortable way to spend an evening than watching the gaming industry slowly boil



I sincerely hope Bethesda is the next company to get fucked

 

[cruelio]

Releasing quality RPGs every year is impossible. They take 3-4 years to make, if not longer. If a company pumps out one RPG a year, it's shit.

1997: Fallout
1998: Fallout 2
1999: Planescape Torment
2000: Icewind Dale

pure shit, right?

If someone else does all the work and you re-use the engine and assets then I guess it is possible to crank out mediocre crpgs every year. Lets all start making RPG maker games.

 

[glass blackbird]

There's no more comfortable way to spend an evening than watching the gaming industry slowly boil



I sincerely hope Bethesda is the next company to get fucked

Bethesda somehow still makes fuck-you money by porting Skyrim endlessly. Hard to beat a return on investment of a game you don't have to even pay to develop again

 

[Vault Dweller]

Releasing quality RPGs every year is impossible. They take 3-4 years to make, if not longer. If a company pumps out one RPG a year, it's shit.

1997: Fallout
1998: Fallout 2
1999: Planescape Torment
2000: Icewind Dale

pure shit, right?

Fallout 1 was a true 10/10 masterpiece. Such games don't come often. Fallout 2 was good ONLY because it was a sequel to a great game. Its design was subpar to Fallout in every way. PST was a gem but they had the engine with most systems and assets. IWD was nice but nowhere close to Fallout and PST in terns of design, writing, storytelling, or role-playing. The factors that let Interplay/BIS produce 4 such games no longer exist, so we can consider it an exception.

 

[Infinitron]

You've lost me there. You wonder why a game that offered more of the underwhelming same sold 200k copies and not 400k or 600k copies and present this as the ultimate proof of the market's oversaturation?

Yes, oversaturation for a particular caliber of game.

It's like Tigranes said. I don't think it's realistic to plan a business around hitting it out of the ball park every time, so the average amount of sales you can expect to get matters. I guess it's sort of a populist approach.