Eternity PoE II: Deadfire Sales Analysis Thread

[Lycra Suit]

I know 5.

 

[Sentinel]

He forgot that a large part of his fans fucking hate romances.

 

[Lycra Suit]

I don't think romances are to blame for Deadfire's poor sales. Neither is the audacity to acknowledge the existence of LGBT characters in a fantasy setting.

 

[Sentinel]

Dunno. I decided not to buy it because of romances. That was my primary reason.

 

[Trashos]

and it ends.

Pillars of Eternity 2 director Josh Sawyer has an enviable list of credits to his name, from Icewind Dale to Neverwinter Nights 2, Fallout: New Vegas, and Tyranny

lol, gaming journalism

You will be remembered for Tyranny, Josh.

 

[2house2fly]

I know 5.

Sweet. Can't wait for you to name them.

 

[Lhynn]

Sure some of those things might have influenced the poor sales, but the main reason why D:OS2 was success and POE2 is a flop is because D:OS was a good game or a atleast a decent game with potential and POE was a boring piece of shit that only Obsidiantards with low standards and shit taste enjoyed.

Yep. PoE1 was so shit it salted the land for any sequel to come. That much is obvious.

 

[Jezal_k23]

Looking at how extremely low PoE1's achievement %s are - only 43% finished Act 1 - it probably suffers from the same issue as Legend of Grimrock: a lot of people bought it blindly due to the hype but found out that they don't like IE-style games.

Or they don't like Obsidian's take on it, at least.

I have a theory that Deadfire's low sales might be a long standing reaction to the general audience being disappointed/bored with PoE on release.

I've been thinking and this could be the reason for Deadfire's disappointing sales. It looks like a lot of people simply didn't like PoE's initial release, despite general critical acclaim. We've seen the effects of it in The White March which sold badly. Obsidian thought it was because TWM came out too long after Pillars and interest had faded - what if that was not the main reason? What if the actual reason was very low excitement for PoE following its release, so much that 57% of players didn't even finish Act 1 (and then left and never came back to the franchise)?

It looks like people really didn't like the game and didn't return after its patching and didn't care about the release of better content. That might have resulted in a disappointing TWM sales, and subsequent Deadfire sales.

 

[Quillon]

and it ends.

Pillars of Eternity 2 director Josh Sawyer has an enviable list of credits to his name, from Icewind Dale to Neverwinter Nights 2, Fallout: New Vegas, and Tyranny

lol, gaming journalism

You will be remembered for Tyranny, Josh.

Reminds me:

Like Tyranny?

Like what?

Tyranny.

 

[fantadomat]

and it ends.

Pillars of Eternity 2 director Josh Sawyer has an enviable list of credits to his name, from Icewind Dale to Neverwinter Nights 2, Fallout: New Vegas, and Tyranny

lol, gaming journalism

You will be remembered for Tyranny, Josh.

 

[Great Deceiver]

And so this tester says, "You are fucking lying. You're so full of shit." He's like, "Show me – show me how you did it." So I load it in, and I started pre-buffing. And I had three casters going for five rounds pre-buffing, and people drinking potions. He's asks, "What are you doing?" "I'm pre-buffing." He's like, "What do you mean?" So I explained all the different bonuses that I got, and how they stacked with each other, and how I cast the longest duration spells first, so that by the time I got to my shortest duration ones, that they were at the end of sequence and all this stuff. And then I transitioned, and I went in, and I fucking just wiped out the whole map. And he was like, "That's how you're supposed to do that?" I'm like, "Yeah, that's how I do every fight."

I know the tester is to blame. But I think devs are to blame too. With Icewind Dale especially, I realized one thing: if you have never, ever played D&D or a D&D inspired cRPG before, you are going to have a bad time, even on Core rules. On the other hand, those who have done one of those, or both, will have a breeze. In my opinion, this is because you advance far too quickly, whereas real life tabletop sessions, I assume, aren't like that. It's too much info to take all at once. Those who are familiar with D&D may know every spell from memory. Those who aren't, like myself, usually use whatever information they know from less hardcore RPGs, most of which heavily rely on doing damage as opposed to buffing, debuffing, casting AoE spells and the like. It is a rather rare case where the "Normal" difficulty's only target audience are those who want to play the game as the game was intended to be played (which in IE games literally means "by the rules"), because everyone else either finds it a joke or too hard to be fun. To be honest, RTwP combat is shit anyways.

Heavy prebuffing and a good strategy make the difference between being horribly killed, and breezing through a fight, as both my experience with Trials of the Luremaster and Sawyer's comment show.

First question is, why are you playing Trials of the Luremaster? As far as IE superdungeons go, it's fucking awful. Not worth it at all. In fact, Heart of Winter is pretty fucking bad, too. As much as I like IWD (which is a lot), the base game is really the only part worth playing or replaying. It's pretty much the perfect campaign in my opinion.

Second of all, 2nd edition AD&D is full of noob traps, useless spells and the like, but you don't really need to min-max to complete any of the IE games. Playing them for the first time after visiting the Codex and reading people's opinions on them will give you a very skewed perspective. No one played them on insane and solo on their first run, there are many people here who have been playing these things for close to 20 years now and know every little detail inside and out. So no, not everyone else finds them "a joke or too hard" the first time they play, if they're a basically competent person who enjoys challenging games they will be able to complete the game after a learning curve, if they're not bitches and give up after the first party wipe. (Base) IWD has perfectly serviceable difficulty on normal rules because designers actually thought normal difficulty was supposed to be a good challenge back in the day.

Prebuffing makes a huge difference of course, and the game doesn't hold your hand to teach you these things - some foreknowledge of the system is assumed even if the documentation included with the games was no slouch. I guess what I'm trying to say is that IE games don't need you to be a powergaming munchkin to enjoy them, but there's an option to do that, which is nice and increases replay value.

I mainly replay IWD because I like the setting and atmosphere, the locations and enemies are very varied (especially if you compare it to shit like the first PoE) and there are no massive lore dumps getting in the way of gameplay. IE games are quick to play. They're not the deepest or the hardest, and RTwP is clunky, but you can play them quickly once you get the hang of it and it's like RPG fast food. I alternate between them and Goldbox games whenever I want my computer AD&D fix.

I'll never replay PoE.

 

[Fairfax]

Deadfire's budget was expected to be 40%-50% higher than Pillars of Eternity's even before later unexpected expenses.
Pillars of Eternity's budget was at least 5m.
Source:
http://www.gamebanshee.com/interviews/118557-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire-interview/page-3.html

From Blood, Sweat, and Pixels:

With additional backing they received on PayPal and the Obsidian backer website, their final budget was around $5.3 million.*
*Fulfilling and shipping Kickstarter rewards like T-shirts and portraits would drain hundreds of thousands from that sum, so the actual budget was closer to $4.5 million.

Delaying the game to March 2015 would ultimately gobble up an extra $1.5 million of the studio’s money, according to Urquhart, but it was the right move.

PoE1's budget was at least $6 million. That means PoE2 was expected to cost ~$8.5-9 million before the delay, doubled word count, full VO, etc. The final budget must be in the $9-10 million range. It raised $4,407,598 via Fig, which left roughly $4.5-5 million for Obsidian to pay, although it's likely Versus Evil shared some of the costs.

So how much does the game have to make to be successful?

• Obsidian gets $35 from every $50 copy sold, before having to split the revenue with Versus Evil and Fig investors.
• $2,250,000 came from Fig investors, who will take 16.07% of the revenue ($5.62 out of the $35) until $2,542,500 are returned. That mark would be reached at ~452,402 copies sold at $50 on Steam, but there are deluxe editions and DLC, so somewhere around 400-450k copies. After that point, Fig investors take 8.035%.
• Assuming a 5-10% cut for Versus Evil, Obsidian would take between $27.62 and $25.87 from every $50 copy until that point. If Obsidian spent $5 million on the game, they would have to sell ~180-190k copies to break even.
• For Obsidian to make the $16 million they'd made from PoE1 when the PoE2 Fig was launched, PoE2 would have to sell roughly 575-615k copies at $50.

With 33,614 copies being from backers, the current 100-200k figure is definitely a bad look. Obsidian didn't have a lot of skin in the game, so they'll eventually make their money back, but this is far from the success they expected.

 

[Jezal_k23]

I'm sure they expected much better. I wonder what they can do from here on out to get the franchise back on track.

 

[FreeKaner]

I think if they do want to keep the IP afloat they need to develop it further even if it means sinking funds into it.

 

[Trashos]

Even if it goes a bit better than currently expected, I see no reason for a sequel from a business point of view. It would make more sense to take the risk and develop a brand new IP. Now, if PoE2 reaches a cult status in the far future after heavy patching and modding, then it's different.

 

[FreeKaner]

It would not only be more sensible to wrap up PoE chapter here from a business perspective, it could also be potentially be better for making good games too. I think there is some spark of talent in Obsidian still, but it's not in creating good historical fantasy world or integrating it. In PoE1 and PoE2 both there are some better stuff when they move away from that and deal with interactions of people and little stories they tell. As a studio though they seem fairly irredeemable due Feargus. Also because of Feargus again they will probably not do that and do the both insensible and disappoting thing.

 

[Immortal]

Trying to get a rise outta OBS in their discord:

What the fuck? Did they burn the Onyx source code at Obshitian or something?

They HAVE their own engine.

Not really, the so called Onyx "engine" is really just middleware cobbled together, and and Obsidian had to pay a small fortune in licensing costs for each game they used it for.

Not only that.. Based on when they shipped their last game on that engine.. (Stick of Truth? Dungeon Seige 3???)
It would be way out of date. I bet the libraries they are hooked up to at this point are so deep in technical debt - they need to blow the dust off it.

For better or worse, they are better off just using Unity.

 

[Lhynn]

Maaaybe they should de-own someone and get D&Ds licence.

 

[Major_Blackhart]

I'll get the game, but not until first DLC is released I think.

 

[fantadomat]

PoE IP is pretty much worthless,it is a generic world filled with plotholes bigger than the world and kind of mediocre fallowing,wouldn't even call it a fanbase.It doesn't shine with anything good,i see no reason for someone to buy this IP and not make better one with money. The greatest problem for the game is the lack of good writing. All the classics have a ton of problems,but all of them have really good writing. It is what is important in a rpg.

 

[frajaq]

I wouldn't call it a generic world but one where the possibly cool features of it are severely wasted by the devs

Pillars of Eternity 1 should have been set DURING the Saint's War, and Thaos's revelations and archipelago funtimes should have been for PoE 2

 

[Morality Games]

Even if it goes a bit better than currently expected, I see no reason for a sequel from a business point of view. It would make more sense to take the risk and develop a brand new IP. Now, if PoE2 reaches a cult status in the far future after heavy patching and modding, then it's different.

It will sell well as a trilogy, most likely.

Hong Kong got carried that way.

 

[Lycra Suit]

I know 5.

Sweet. Can't wait for you to name them.

I thought this was pretty self explanatory. But you have to spell out everything for millennials these days. Even humor.

 

[imweasel]

Maaaybe they should de-own someone and get D&Ds licence.

Baldur's Gate 3 with the PoE Engine and without (D&D and Baldur's Gate hater) Sawyer as director...

That sounds very enticing.

 

[Lhynn]

Name a game in this style that looks better.

Final fantasy XIII, Final fantasy XV.