Obsidian and inXile acquired by Microsoft

[TemplarGR]

The reason why Witcher 3 flopped was that it was a direct sequel to Witcher 2.
The reason why BG2 flopped was that it was a direct sequel to BG.
The reason why Arkham City flopped was that it was a direct sequel to Arkham Asylum.
Yes, guys. PoE 2 flopped has nothing to do with its quality.

It's quality is good. It got STELLAR REVIEWS. It is a good game. PoE2 flooped because most potential buyers took a wait and see approach. I did. I am going to buy it, when the third expansion comes out, and it gets a nice bundled price. I suspect that a lot of PoE 1 players will do the same. We got burned by PoE 1 and its constant patching that changed everything about the combat system and 2 expansions that needed a new playthrough...

So you can say PoE2 flopped because of the quality of the original game...

 

[markec]

It's quality is good. It got STELLAR REVIEWS. It is a good game.

Well if it got STELLAR REVIEWS it must be good, after all we all know that gaming journalists are beacons of integrity and fine taste.

 

[RRRrrr]

How do you market RPGs then? How do you achieve these sustainable sales? Just by making games and hoping for the best?

Marketing is first and foremost about understanding what the demand is for, and then about trying to reach as many potential buyers as possible. Sometimes, there simply is not enough demand for multiple games of a certain scale. If your market is of 1 million potential buyers, and you need about 1 million sales to be profitable, chances are you cannot have 2-3 games of this scale a year, regardless of their quality. If your outlier sold 1 million, you cannot hope that every game will sell as much, even if it is of the same quality and scale. Not everyone buying the best RPG of the year will buy two other RPGs the same year.


There are two ways to achieve sustainability-increased sales or decreased costs. You can achieve the former by competing on a bigger market (i.e. making the game more accessible), and the latter by decreasing the scale of the game (perhaps significantly). What you cannot have is multiple releases of the scale of PoE or TToN on the current market.

 

[Alpan]

Codexers that hate POE say this every 5 seconds, but do we have any broader indication that, say, hundreds of thousands of people who bought POE really hated it and it made them swear off the sequel? I don't think this is a problem that is unique to POE. Banner Saga, XCOM, Grimrock - it is quite common for sequels to not recapture the unexpected success of your first game. The problem is that Obsidian, like the Banner Saga people, didn't anticipate this logical drop in their planning.

You don't need to hate the first game to opt out of the sequel -- somewhat liking it is enough. For whatever reason -- but probably due to co-op and environmental combat -- Divinity: Original Sin elicited stronger reactions from its players, left more memorable moments in their minds.

No part of the Pillars franchise is designed to leave a strong impression. Plot and setting-wise it's fueled by nostalgia, and in terms of systems it's balance all the way down.

 

[RRRrrr]

Well if it got STELLAR REVIEWS it must be good, after all we all know that gaming journalists are beacons of integrity and fine taste.

The Witcher 3 is very well received. The Review Metascore and the User score on Metacritic are both 9.3/10. It is not like game journalists had been pushing the game despite its low quality. The Witcher 3 achieved tremendous success and is in fact the best thing the mainstream market has to offer.

 

[The Bishop]

Personally, I don't think coop in DOS2 or Deadfire being more of the same played that big of a role in their market performance. What I think did play big role is player experience.

Average player experience in PoE: start the game, collect some berries and mushrooms, hey, enemies attacking! A second later everything clumps into one featureless blob flashing with attack animations and spell effects. Player looses or wins. In either case he's left wondering what the fuck happened. Now, I personally spent enough time with the game and RTwP genre in general to be able to control and decipher it well enough. I also read the manual, browsed the wiki and experimented with combat using console commands. With that in mind I had decent time playing the game. I don't however believe most people went anywhere near the same lengths to be able to enjoy it.

DOS on the other hand is very readable and easy to understand. You collect stuff. You combine stuff into other stuff. You launch fireball and stuff starts burning. Standing near fire makes you warm. Stepping into fire causes damage. Fire is being put out by water. Not only all of this is easy to understand and read off the screen. It's also very easy to tell about that to somebody else. DOS is the type of game that is easy to get into, easy to have fun with, and most importantly easy to show and explain to others why it is fun.

tl;dr Accessibility actually matters.

 

[Deleted Member 22431]

I wouldn't bundle all these titles together. An argument might be made that most DO1 players didn't finish the game because the second half was objectively much worse. Or that, as I said above, PoE1 and XCOM rode hard the credit deriving from the old classics they claimed to be inspired to, and that works only if the game you release keeps its promises. Or that Banner Saga was overhyped as hell (mostly due to the gorgeous graphics and atmosphere). Or that Grimrock 1 projected the aura of a worthy heir to classic blobbers, and it came short, breaking the illusion in similar fashion to PoE1. Etc. etc.

It's much worse than this. Nearly 37% of all registered Steam games (that’s 781 million titles) have never been played. Read this and this. How can we take these numbers at face value if nearly half of the games are never played? Steam sales and humble bundles are part of the reason, but I have the suspicion that players buy expensive games on release that they never intend to play just because they feel the need to be on the loop of the latest hot shit, because they are gamers and that's what expected from that, etc. It's easier to buy games and feel good about yourself even though deep down you never had the intention to play most of them. Typical consumerist behaviour.

Only 5%(!) of players finished DO:S, yet the game and the sequel was a success. This is an obvious indicative that these numbers don't reflect how many actually enjoy these games. You talked about the second part being a chore. This didn't affect the reception of the second game. How come? I also bet that very few players played the game after the first two hours because players are being induced to buy and say positive things about games they don't like and don't want to play. I remember someone here on the Codex defending D:OS2, but the dude didn't even played the damn game. “I have the game on my library and I didn't play because I don’t have the time, but it's a good game!”. Pure rationalization and herd mentality.

 

[PorkBarrellGuy]

No part of the Pillars franchise is designed to leave a strong impression. Plot and setting-wise it's fueled by nostalgia, and in terms of systems it's balance all the way down.

Many things are surprisingly forgivable in an RPG if it leaves a strong positive impression in spite of those things, and this is probably exemplified by Arcanum (as one example). Blandness, however, is utterly unforgivable.

 

[TemplarGR]

I'm not talking about hitting it out of the ball park every time. I'm talking about not expecting to do well just because. PoE 2 is a good example of that. It's not a bad game but it's a game that failed to offer anything new and interesting to the player, which is a cardinal sin that will always be punished with poor sales. Compare BG2 vs BG1 to PoE2 vs PoE1.


How do you market RPGs then? How do you achieve these sustainable sales? Just by making games and hoping for the best?


The problems with sequels is that they go for more of the same. That's not what Witcher 3 did at all (a very well done sandbox vs a mostly linear game with a chapter fork in the middle). BG2 built quite a lot on the fairly generic BG1 foundation, making a much better game than the original. PoE2 went for more of the same.

1) BG1vsBG2 to PoE1vsPoE2 is an apples to oranges comparison. 20 years ago, Baldur's Gate was an AAA game. It was not niche, and it did not have to compete with the vast array of gaming software that exists today... 20 years ago we didn't have Fortnites, MOBAs, huge amounts of AAA games, etc, competing for our time. 20 years ago Baldur's Gate was THE SHIT, it appeared in the front covers of most gaming magazines of the time... People bought BG2 in droves because for most PC gaming magazines it was GOTY.

2) Witcher 3 is also a not viable comparison. 90% of Witcher 3 fans never played the original 2 games. Witcher 3 became a huge success because it got polished (no pun intended) more with great AAA production values, and obviously because it appeared on both consoles and it was leaps and bounds better than anything else on those platforms in 2015. Considering the vast gap that still separates The Witcher 3 to all other AAA console releases, i would say that it sold very poorly...

3) As for what improvements BG2 made compared to BG1, i beg to differ. I consider BG1 the superior game in many areas other than game engine. BG2 was just "more of the same". It just had "moar levels, moar items, moar enemies, 800x600 resolutions, more opengl effects, more AI nodes". I don't see what was truly improved in BG2 compared to 1. I find it ironic that you consider that PoE 2 was "more of the same" but BGII "was different". Yes it was different in the sense that it was far more linear, with a worse story and cringey romances, and battles that became huge fucking slogs mid-late game with all the high level spells flying around...

 

[Tigranes]

Codexers that hate POE say this every 5 seconds, but do we have any broader indication that, say, hundreds of thousands of people who bought POE really hated it and it made them swear off the sequel? I don't think this is a problem that is unique to POE. Banner Saga, XCOM, Grimrock - it is quite common for sequels to not recapture the unexpected success of your first game. The problem is that Obsidian, like the Banner Saga people, didn't anticipate this logical drop in their planning.

You don't need to hate the first game to opt out of the sequel -- somewhat liking it is enough. For whatever reason -- but probably due to co-op and environmental combat -- Divinity: Original Sin elicited stronger reactions from its players, left more memorable moments in their minds.

No part of the Pillars franchise is designed to leave a strong impression. Plot and setting-wise it's fueled by nostalgia, and in terms of systems it's balance all the way down.

The problem I have with attaching sales to quality is that people twist their subjective judgments to fit whatever narrative there is. Oblivion was a fucking calamity, but millions of people played it and then rewarded Skyrim with far larger sales. Does that make Oblivion a good game? Did Skyrim really present significantly new set of features to excite the market?

If people just want to say "poe sux so bad that's why it failed", then they would have to explain why so many other games that excited people (e.g. Grimrock) tanked in sequel numbers, and why so many shitty games (e.g. Oblivion) succeed massively sequel after sequel.

A slightly better approach is to say, "it's not about quality, it's about whether the buyers, the target audience, was satisfied." If we could show that hundreds of thousands of POE buyers were unsatisfied with what they got, then it doesn't matter if they were angry about the RPG mechanics or the lack of gay romances - it would be a valid basis for the argument. The problem is, I haven't seen any reasonable data that 20, 30, 40, 50% of POE buyers hated POE because it wasn't a BG clone, for example. It sure sounds like a plausible narrative, but sounding like a plausible narrative has nothing to do with showing that this is actually what happened.

(Equally, I have no interest in arguing that "POE1 or POE2 was a great game, so the reason for poor sales must lie elsewhere". I don't think that's a valid argument either; it would be like saying "omg i hated the inventory in grimoire of course that's the exact reason it didn't sell 5 million copies".)

 

[Brancaleone]

I wouldn't bundle all these titles together. An argument might be made that most DO1 players didn't finish the game because the second half was objectively much worse. Or that, as I said above, PoE1 and XCOM rode hard the credit deriving from the old classics they claimed to be inspired to, and that works only if the game you release keeps its promises. Or that Banner Saga was overhyped as hell (mostly due to the gorgeous graphics and atmosphere). Or that Grimrock 1 projected the aura of a worthy heir to classic blobbers, and it came short, breaking the illusion in similar fashion to PoE1. Etc. etc.

It's much worse than this. Nearly 37% of all registered Steam games (that’s 781 million titles) have never been played. Read this and this. How can we take these numbers at face value if nearly half of the games are never played? Steam sales and humble bundles are part of the reason, but I have the suspicion that players buy expensive games on release that they never intend to play just because they feel the need to be on the loop of the latest hot shit, because they are gamers and that's what expected from that, etc. It's easier to buy games and feel good about yourself even though deep down you never had the intention to play most of them. Typical consumerist behaviour.

Only 5%(!) of players finished DO:S, yet the game and the sequel was a success. This is an obvious indicative that these numbers don't reflect how many actually enjoy these games. You talked about the second part being a chore. This didn't affect the reception of the second game. How come? I also bet that very few players played the game after the first two hours because players are being induced to buy and say positive things about certain titles they don't like and don't want to play. I remember someone defending DO:S2 here on the Codex, but the dude didn't even played the damn game. “I have the game on my library and I didn't play because I don’t have the time, but it’s a good game!”. Pure rationalization and herd mentality.

I know about the statistics: the point is, how do we separate between casuals/impulse buyers who weren't really interested in the game, and gamers who dropped the game because they thought it was shit?

I'm not a yuge DOS1 fan, but I'd say that in the mind of most players the first half of the game was good enough to give a chance to the sequel. When a game is good in its first half and not so good in the second, what players wish to think gettin a sequel that is even better is a real possibility, since they'll "just" need the same quality of the first one, only across the entire game. As a personal take on the matter, I think that the second half of Arcanum is close to unbearable: if somebody happened to announce a sequel, I'd be clinging to their doorbell in order to slap them with thick wads of banknotes as soon as they opened the door.

 

[Alpan]

...
A slightly better approach is to say, "it's not about quality, it's about whether the buyers, the target audience, was satisfied." If we could show that hundreds of thousands of POE buyers were unsatisfied with what they got, then it doesn't matter if they were angry about the RPG mechanics or the lack of gay romances - it would be a valid basis for the argument. The problem is, I haven't seen any reasonable data that 20, 30, 40, 50% of POE buyers hated POE because it wasn't a BG clone, for example. It sure sounds like a plausible narrative, but sounding like a plausible narrative has nothing to do with showing that this is actually what happened.

What I intended to say was that thousands of PoE buyers were not dissatisfied by the game -- they were satisfied, but not sufficiently so that they would buy its sequel.

 

[Deleted Member 22431]

I know about the statistics: the point is, how do we separate between casuals/impulse buyers who weren't really interested in the game, and gamers who dropped the game because they thought it was shit?

We don't. That's why these numbers shouldn't be taken at face value. The game can be a success because people actually enjoyed or not.

 

[Funposter]

The statistic of "only 5% of people finished" mainly tells you that RPGs are very long and consumers are very time-poor.

Edit: I should qualify this statement by saying that Skyrim etc. have higher percentages because they are easy to pick up and play for 30-60 mins thanks to quest markers etc.

 

[Brancaleone]

I know about the statistics: the point is, how do we separate between casuals/impulse buyers who weren't really interested in the game, and gamers who dropped the game because they thought it was shit?

We don't. That's why these numbers shouldn't be taken at face value. The game can be a success because people actually enjoyed or not.

I agree, this kind of statistics are not of much help. In the end, I see it as quite a simple matter: PoE1 was universally touted as the second coming of Christ ("the combination of the best elements of BG, BG2, IWD, IWD2 and PT"), it turned out to suck ass, and most people did not bother with the sequel. I'm going to sound monotonous, but all the stuff about a "small market for this kind of games" is utter bullshit, when huge numbers of people buy Beamdog's remakes even though they don't offer much, just because it's BG/BG2 after all. Really, do I have to believe that those people would have needed some astonishing amount of top-level marketing to buy 'the sequel to the great heir to IE games', if only PoE1 had fullfilled its promises even in part?

 

[Sacred82]

...
A slightly better approach is to say, "it's not about quality, it's about whether the buyers, the target audience, was satisfied." If we could show that hundreds of thousands of POE buyers were unsatisfied with what they got, then it doesn't matter if they were angry about the RPG mechanics or the lack of gay romances - it would be a valid basis for the argument. The problem is, I haven't seen any reasonable data that 20, 30, 40, 50% of POE buyers hated POE because it wasn't a BG clone, for example. It sure sounds like a plausible narrative, but sounding like a plausible narrative has nothing to do with showing that this is actually what happened.

What I intended to say was that thousands of PoE buyers were not dissatisfied by the game -- they were satisfied, but not sufficiently so that they would buy its sequel.

that's not how people work.

 

[RRRrrr]

The problem is, I haven't seen any reasonable data that 20, 30, 40, 50% of POE buyers hated POE

They didn't. As much as the Codex like to claim the contrary, PoE was generally well liked. Personally, I didn't like it, but I didn't find it horrible either. It certainly did not excite me for a sequel in any way.

Oblivion was a fucking calamity, but millions of people played it and then rewarded Skyrim with far larger sales. Does that make Oblivion a good game? Did Skyrim really present significantly new set of features to excite the market?

There is an important distinction here-neither Skyrim, nor The Witcher 3, were strictly more of the same as their predecessor. They improved a lot where it mattered (i.e. what the fans demanded) and there was a reason to play them. Skyrim improved upon Oblivion's combat, it was better, shinier and appealed to a broader audience. The same goes for The Witcher 3-it was more entertaining, open-world, had more engaging combat and was far more spectacular than The Witcher 2.

You can watcher Skyrim gameplay and go "That is an improvement upon Oblivion!". You can clearly see the difference between The Witcher 2 and The Witcher 3.
You cannot say the same of PoE 2.


In short, the performance of PoE 2 speaks more of its own quality than of PoE1. A good sequel to a bad/boring predecessor can sell extremely well, but the opposite cannot happen.

The statistic of "only 5% of people finished" mainly tells you that RPGs are very long and consumers are very time-poor.

Not necessarily. Once the novelty of a game wears off, or you hit a more mundane part of it, and you have something more novel to play, you most certainly prefer to play the latter.

 

[TemplarGR]

The statistic of "only 5% of people finished" mainly tells you that RPGs are very long and consumers are very time-poor.

This is the simple truth. This is the fault of the developers, for many decades they have cultivated a culture of "the more hours the better" for RPGs specifically. RPGs are the only game genre that gets marketed with "X hours of content" on the game's backcover... This used to happen because games were expensive in the 80s and the 90s so they had to fill the game with trash mobs and prolong the playtime. This stuck as a convention and it still applies to RPGs today.

Oftentimes when i read about an RPG and they say it has "80 hours of playtime" i cringe. This is the reason i never bothered to finish Dragon Age Cuckquisition. After i realized that the story part is 3-4 hours at best and the rest of the 80 hour slog is grinding repetitive random battles with bullet sponge colorswap enemies, i uninstalled. I just watched the rest of the cutscenes in a movie version on Youtube...

Why is it so hard to go back to the early Fallout games? Fallout games were VERY short, (you can speedrun them in 10 minutes), but were also very replayable and they were fun enough to warrant multiple-playthroughs. So they could accomondate both the time-limited player and the 12 year old with the marathon playtimes...

The only marathon game i played recently that was really worth the 120 hour playtime, was the Witcher 3 + expansions. But it is very hard to expect Witcher 3 quality in narrative,quests and presentation for every game.... Why not just make games shorter and cut the excess fat? Shorter experiences delivering more quality playtime per hour is what developers should be aiming for.

 

[Vault Dweller]

How do you market RPGs then? How do you achieve these sustainable sales? Just by making games and hoping for the best?

Marketing is first and foremost about understanding what the demand is for, and then about trying to reach as many potential buyers as possible.

Marketing, "first and foremost", is about creating demand by convincing people that they must buy what you're selling.

 

[PorkBarrellGuy]

How do you market RPGs then? How do you achieve these sustainable sales? Just by making games and hoping for the best?

Marketing is first and foremost about understanding what the demand is for, and then about trying to reach as many potential buyers as possible.

Marketing, "first and foremost", is about creating demand by convincing people that they must buy what you're selling.

"Must" is an awfully strong word.

 

[2house2fly]

The reason why Witcher 3 flopped was that it was a direct sequel to Witcher 2.
The reason why BG2 flopped was that it was a direct sequel to BG.
The reason why Arkham City flopped was that it was a direct sequel to Arkham Asylum.
Yes, guys. PoE 2 flopped has nothing to do with its quality.

Arkham and Witcher are mainstream AAA titles with high production values and colossal marketing budgets. Witcher 3 was advertised as a killer app for years before it was released. You know there's more to sales than quality, or elkse you would believe PoE1 is better than Underrail.

What I intended to say was that thousands of PoE buyers were not dissatisfied by the game -- they were satisfied, but not sufficiently so that they would buy its sequel.

That's a fair point- when I'm satisfied by a meal, I edon't feel a desire to eat any more

 

[DeepOcean]

A slightly better approach is to say, "it's not about quality, it's about whether the buyers, the target audience, was satisfied." If we could show that hundreds of thousands of POE buyers were unsatisfied with what they got, then it doesn't matter if they were angry about the RPG mechanics or the lack of gay romances - it would be a valid basis for the argument. The problem is, It sure sounds like a plausible narrative, but sounding like a plausible narrative has nothing to do with showing that this is actually what happened.

The actual reason most people didn't bought PoE 2 we will ever know, if they didn't like the gameplay, if it was because of the shitty combat on PoE 1 or if it was an horde of clueless casuals, it will remain being a mystery but according to this:
https://www.dsogaming.com/news/pill...d-110k-copies-worldwide-until-september-2018/
https://steamspy.com/app/560130

I know, some sales drop was expected but 100.000 to 200.000? Man... I dunno what the reason was but I didn't expected THAT drop, it was a big flop.

Even if Deadfire was the best old school CRPG since BG2/Fallout/PST/whatever, it would still have been unlikely for it to sell a million copies.

Why do you assume getting 1.000.000 copies on Steam is hard? It is hard for a garage developer but 1 million of copies for a successful AA developer with a publisher is the minimum on steam these days. People here on the codex seems to be stuck on 2000, 100.000 copies is nothing for a AA developer on Steam. I can name you games with a fraction of the budget of PoE 2 that got more than 1 million copies.

I haven't seen any reasonable data that 20, 30, 40, 50% of POE buyers hated POE because it wasn't a BG clone, for example.

Well, I didn't like it not because it wast a BG 1 clone but because the combat was awful and the story was extremely boring, while it seems improbable that people didn't buy PoE 2 because PoE 1 wasn't a BG clone it seems probable that many didn't bought PoE 2 for the same reasons I hated PoE 1.

 

[RRRrrr]

Marketing, "first and foremost", is about creating demand by convincing people that they must buy what you're selling.

This is one of the biggest misconceptions about marketing. The most important component of marketing is not advertisement, it is in fact market research. If you try to create demand for something for which demand does not exist in the first place, you are going to have a very, very bad time.

 

[Roguey]

Puzzled by this claim that Deadfire was "more of the same." It's not a Fallout 2-style slam dunk. They made it open world, sunk a lot more money into graphics and voice acting, improved the writing, changed/improved the system (multiclassing, subclasses, marginalizing that pesky "Vancian casting" thing), improved combat pacing and combat encounters. What did Baldur's Gate 2 do over its predecessor? Turn an open world into one big open city plus a linear rest of the game, more races and kits, stronghold quests, more writing and romances. Not Fallout 2, but nothing too grand, not all that different from Deadfire.

 

[TemplarGR]

This is one of the biggest misconceptions about marketing. The most important component of marketing is not advertisement, it is in fact market research. If you try to create demand for something for which demand does not exist in the first place, you are going to have a very, very bad time.

Wait, you mean that if Lamborghini decides to build 50 million Galliardos per year, they would go bankrupt? There is no market for 300k$ cars these days?