Interview Paradox admit Tyranny sold below expectations, DLC still in the works

[Blaine]

Even 4chan knows what's good. (The comment to which they're replying is at the bottom: "Wasn't Underrail fairly popular a while back?")

 

[Roguey]

Underrail needed a deep discount to break six figures and even then only barely.

Fortunately that's all Styg needs.

 

[Blaine]

Underrail needed a deep discount to break six figures and even then only barely.

Fortunately that's all Styg needs.

Underrail also had precisely zero marketing other than word of mouth, no celebrity developers on board, no "birthright IPs" to constantly namedrop (all namedropping was entirely done by fans), and wasn't hailed as the second coming of old-school cRPGs after a years-long dry spell (although it actually is, unlike PoE). Furthermore, I imagine PoE too saw huge surges in purchases during sales, since a great many people now refuse to buy games for full price.

In any event, Styg and co. have at least a few hundred thousand dollars to their collective names now, which in his country is like a billion dollars. I strongly suspect he profited more from Underrail personally than any individual member of the Obsidian team did from PoE, even considering how long he's been working on the game.

You've used sales figures to measure the relative worth of RPGs before and I've always found that strange, since by that yardstick plenty of console shovelware is vastly superior to PoE, and Underrail would then be clearly superior to AoD (which it is, but for the sake of argument... ).

But wait! AoD is more expensive than Underrail! Now all of a sudden this line of reasoning makes perfect sense.

 

[SausageInYourFace]

Paradox mostly have two kinds of die hard fans (...) those who don't care about strategy but are Game of Thrones fans and play extensively CKII

Is CKII the most popular Paradox grand strategy?

 

[Malpercio]

Even 4chan

>Implying there is a difference between 4chan the codex nowadays.

 

[Blaine]

Well, there's one difference.

4chan still freely recognizes the greatness of Underrail, mainly because the users are anonymous and therefore aren't concerned with accumulating edgy Kodex Street Kred by shitting on the game. Shitting on superior cRPGs has always been a great way to build Kodex Street Kred with the Kool Krowd—especially in Underrail's case, because butthurt AoD fans who insist on making it a competition and Roxor's review that lists some cons and failings of the game (which absolutely do exist) are excellent enablers.

You can't build Street Kred by praising a game. You can only harvest Brofists that way, and those hardly matter anymore since they've been diluted with mobile emojis. You've got to shit on whichever games it's currently in vogue to hate for some baffling reason.

 

[Jedi Master Radek]

You can only harvest Brofists that way, and those hardly matter anymore since they've been diluted with mobile emojis

One brofist counts as many emojis, you silly. Prestigious and salute may be the only exceptions.

 

[Trash]

There are a lot of reasons why Tyranny really didn't do all that well. The fact that it went neither for the hardcore niche genre or the casual rpg player demographic is probably the main one. Lacklustre advertising and well deserved mediocre reviews didn't help either. Game felt schizophrenic and rather underdevloped to me. Lots of flashy special effects with simple combat with a handful of enemy types that met a lot of c&c that turned out to be rather inconsequential. You don't please anyone with that. What really irked me personally is how it was sold as the player working for the evil overlord when the entire game turns into the player trying to stop working for that same evil overlord.

Lots of bad decisions all around. Either that, or they quickly came to the conclusion the game really wasn't all that and they spend their resources elsewhere while going through the motions. Still, I enjoyed kicking that one guy off that tower. It had that at least.

 

[Wonderdog]

Well, there's one difference.

4chan still freely recognizes the greatness of Underrail, mainly because the users are anonymous and therefore aren't concerned with accumulating edgy Kodex Street Kred by shitting on the game. Shitting on superior cRPGs has always been a great way to build Kodex Street Kred with the Kool Krowd—especially in Underrail's case, because butthurt AoD fans who insist on making it a competition and Roxor's review that lists some cons and failings of the game (which absolutely do exist) are excellent enablers.

You can't build Street Kred by praising a game. You can only harvest Brofists that way, and those hardly matter anymore since they've been diluted with mobile emojis. You've got to shit on whichever games it's currently in vogue to hate for some baffling reason.

You are describing cuck cred. Edgelords don't care about cred, just brofists.

 

[Brayko]

It's Paradox, why even bother mentioning sales? Better to fall off the radar than go Bethesda marketing/development or some shit.

Tyranny is like EU: Rome, more thematic than anything, and should expect similar sales.

 

[Trash]

EU: Rome is at times bloody fantastic though. Civil wars, unreliable govornors, barbarian hordes, interfaction politics, young upstarts and old politicians jousting and wars that actually bled a nation dry. Too bad Pdox never released the big patch/expansion that would've turned it into a classic.

 

[Brayko]

Love the soundtrack but the trade system made me uninstall it. At least Tyranny has a good progressive character system, better than Pillars at least, which makes you keep retraining for the right skill at the right moment.

 

[holla_cabezas_de_mierda]

“Obsidian did a great job of capitalising on the timing of Kickstarter and the wave of nostalgia for these type of titles,

I hate people who think recent isometric RPGs return to popularity is caused mainly by nostalgia.

But it is. That's why the sales have normalized post-poe.

disagree,

its my opinion that if they went with D&D or D20 3.5 rules and created something along the lines of Icewind dale or some other more classically styled game they would get sales higher than they expected.

They would probably come to the wrong conclusions about why though (as they always seem to do), and would imagine it was because of some obscure lesbian kobold they included or because somebody in the game mentioned Dritz. Inevitably, in the sequel they would go off the rails again- and make it a first person action game where you play transsexual elf trying to romance Dritz believing this will expand their sales demographics. When the sequel flops they will then decide that people don't want 'complicated' isometric RPG's anymore and go back to making world of tank clones.

 

[Excidium II]

its my opinion that if they went with D&D or D20 3.5 rules and created something along the lines of Icewind dale or some other more classically styled game they would get sales higher than they expected.

Yeah because of D&D license. I wouldn't say "higher than expected", but higher nonetheless.

 

[Humanity has risen!]

Or maybe people just didn't have any interest in this bullshit pretentious "lore" that didn't amount to anything?

 

[Hobo Elf]

Laser point focus on the game being a B-production and then they tried to sell it for 45€. The utter retards got the sales they deserved.

 

[vonAchdorf]

I think Jeff Vogel's latest blog might be true in so far, that people weren't inclined to buy and play another 600k word game so short after the playable / complete PoE came out. Especially after the latter was already criticized for it's overly long expositions. Also the "evil won" marketing wasn't well-thought-out. When I first heard about the game it sounded interesting, but the marketing killed my interest pretty quickly, because it was obvious, that the whole "evil" thing was about as accurate as Daedalic calling their band of misfits "blackguards" and suggesting that the player would, for a change, play some "bad/criminal" guys.

 

[Blaine]

Judging by the sales figures, they certainly made enough to cover everyone's cuts (Paradox, Steam/GOG), pay the developers' salaries, pay for the development costs and overhead, etc. They just didn't make much of a profit.

I expect that's pretty much how it will go for Obsidian's isometric RTwP projects from now on. Larger projects will sell more copies, but will also cost more to produce.

The entire crop of throwback RPGs has been, shall we say, not entirely satisfying when taken as a whole. Most of them didn't quite hit the mark, and a few drunkenly bumbled over the finish line with their pants halfway to their knees and their junk hanging out. People are welcome to their own opinions, but none of this shit is blowing me away. I played through PoE exactly once, and I'm more likely to revisit Fallout/2 (or NV for that matter) than PoE in the future, even though I've played those games dozens of times collectively during the past twenty years.

But hey, at least they're being made! That's a plus. The best of the bunch by far are without a doubt Underrail and AoD, which is particularly funny since neither of them were crowdfunded. D:OS is also way up there, although it dipped into Kickstarter.

 

[Lurker King]

Shitting on superior cRPGs has always been a great way to build Kodex Street Kred with the Kool Krowd—especially in Underrail's case, because butthurt AoD fans who insist on making it a competition.

That’s rich. I’m sure that if we made a Venn diagram we would conclude that 99,9% of AoD fans praised UR, but 30% or more of UR fans keep saying that AoD is horrible without any real argument. Me and Goral were tagged, stalked, and had to endure all kinds of shit simply because we do what everyone does in this forum. I’m not seeing you with a fanboy tag, Blaine.

 

[Severian Silk]

What if Larian seriously fuck up D:OS2 somehow?

D:OS2 is available as an alpha beta right now. You can see for yourself. (personally, I found it to be somewhat unrewarding and hard, but I think the balance has been tuned in subsequent patches since I played it, and I missed a whole chunk of content, so it's probably at least decent now; this was also before they added most of the game's headline features)

"Content" was DOS' weak point IMO. The story was not great. I didn't like the level design and art style for the most part either. I started to lose interest towards the end, and only continued in order to finally "beat" the game. Also, you're limited to only 4 PCs, which I find irritating.

 

[Blaine]

That’s rich. I’m sure that if we made a Venn diagram we would conclude that 99,9% of AoD fans praised UR, but 30% or more of UR fans keep saying that AoD is horrible without any real argument. Me and Goral were tagged, stalked, and had to endure all kinds of shit simply because we do what everyone does in this forum. I’m not seeing you with a fanboy tag, Blaine.

You poor, long-suffering, brave martyrs!

I wrote a long and comprehensive preview of Underrail for the Codex, created a "fan collage" for the release day thread that Styg reposted to the official website's release day announcement, and have given away many copies of Underrail. This is just a wild guess, but it's possible that I don't have a fanboy tag because despite the aforementioned, I'm not a completely obsessed and unreasonable lunatic.

What do I mean by "completely obsessed and unreasonable lunatic," you may wonder? Well, I clearly recall being attacked by certain brave martyrs for merely discussing and promoting Underrail too much, because I wasn't lavishing enough attention on AoD. Mind you, I wasn't even discussing AoD at the time, much less criticizing it or comparing it to Underrail. I was accused of various sins such as my post count in the AoD thread being too low.

Your manufactured statistics are complete histrionic nonsense, and a Venn diagram wouldn't be an appropriate way to visualize that type of data in any case. The reality is that vast majority of people acknowledge both games as good cRPGs, most prefer one over the other as befits their tastes, but small cadres of loyal fans of each game troll each other back and forth, mainly for entertainment. You seem to be taking it all fairly seriously, which means that you've been trolled hard.

 

[M0RBUS]

I hate you Blaine, you didn't lavish enough attention on AoD.

 

[Blaine]

Well I can't live without being held in high esteem by you, so it's the shotgun for me.

Goodbye, everyone. I never liked any of you, but then again I've never actually met any of you, so it balances out.

 

[Quillon]

I never liked any of you, but then again I've never actually met any of you, so it balances out.

I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.

 

[Wonderdog]

hi guys I'm posting in this thread too.