Eternity PoE II: Deadfire Sales Analysis Thread

[Infinitron]

If you pledge on Patreon. You get more accurate (or at least, refined) data.

It reads 111,000.

Thanks for this. Can you give us readouts on BattleTech and Frostpunk also?

 

[The Great ThunThun*]

You don't spend a ton of money on full voice acting and dumb down your sequel for casuals without wanting a wider audience than the one you already have. Absurdian's great mistake was not realizing that this is the ceiling. They could have had partial VA and made the strategic elements even more hardcore (or the same) and probably sell a comparable amount.

I think your feeling that the sale are affected by the dumb down are skewed by your bias.

I don't really believe anyone cares about mechanics in such kind of a game. That only is a factor on a place like codex, and thus a minority complaint. I would rather bet that the real reason is that the setting and storytelling are not as good.

 

[Roguey]

I think your feeling that the sale are affected by the dumb down are skewed by your bias.

If it didn't, Bethesda and Bioware wouldn't have been trying so hard to do it all these years.

I would rather bet that the real reason is that the setting and storytelling are not as good.

The details of a setting don't make much difference either. As for storytelling, well that depends on what your definition of good is. A couple of a million people love Bioware storytelling.

 

[Nekot-The-Brave]

From what I recall only a small percentage of PoE owners bothered with completing White March in the first place

Who's brilliant idea was it to stick the expansion in middle of the vanilla game? That's the sole reason I refused to play it. I've never been so bored by a video game (little did i know how Numanuma would turn out), yet they expect me to play through half of it AGAIN just so I can potentially, maybe experience some incline? No thx Obsidian, you don't have enough goodwill to convince me of that.

Underrail does exactly that.

I agree with him, Underrail is actually fun and is worth playing over a few times. While, I don't feel that PoE deserved that.

 

[Glaucon]

Now Obsidian's stuck doing what Bioware did after Dragon Age II and what McComb did after Tides of Numenera: say "Yeah, well the CRITICS love it."

• critics love it
• muh marketing
• poor release window
• plebs can't into incline
• sales are inverse to True Quality™
• people are waiting for complete edition
• its got legs
• muh MCA
• sales don't matter

Am I missing any?

all negativity is coming from a vocal minority

 

[felipepepe]

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.

 

[Trashos]

As far as I understand, the story is Gods+Politics+Pirates (and I am not even counting companion quests, which seem to have impressed noone). It sounds like a recipe for disaster.

Personally, I find the start so infuriatingly bad that I can't even bring myself to watch a Let's Play. But I should at some point.

 

[Jenkem]

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.

or they tried playing it, ran into numerous bugs and missing features and decided to uninstall and never look back.

 

[imweasel]

PoE 2 just dropped off of the top 10 list on Steam in Eurocuckistan - on its first fucking weekend.

I've been giving out warnings since 2013 that Sawyerism might fail. Some of the design is even atrocious enough to make Gary Gygax rotate in his grave.

 

[Morality Games]

If you pledge on Patreon. You get more accurate (or at least, refined) data.

It reads 111,000.

Thanks for this. Can you give us readouts on BattleTech and Frostpunk also?

Frostpunk sold 480,000.

Battletech about 410,000.

 

[aweigh]

I wonder if I'm the only person who would instantly get turned away from the game by such a blatantly arrogant, crude and sellout marketing like this picture above. It's just so terrible in every way. It's also dumb because even casual youtube "critics" made all gamers wary of ratings by the press and 9/10's.

You sure about that cowpoke? I'm fairly sure "all gamers" are the ones who most pay attention to high scoring and youtube critics and take their cues from these sources. Just go to any normie game forum, or go to any normie game channel (twitch or youtube), and the vast majority of the comments will be fighting about consoles and defending their favorite franchise by using parameters such as review scores and units sold.

 

[2house2fly]

- Have an interesting, memorable setting.
- Have good, mature writing. No retarded *makes fart noises in your ear*, no playersexual companions.
- No romances, for that matter.
- Turn-based combat.

This is all news to Bioware

 

[aweigh]

PoE2 wasn't really "dumbed down" though, Roguey. Honestly anyone who claims it was is just edge-lording with a bit of try-harding. The VO thing tracks, though.

EDIT: Or did you mean DOS2?

 

[Major_Blackhart]

So PoE II will be a slow burn? I never really foresaw this game as an overnight hit really. They've basically worn out that 'Hey we're aping Baldur's Gate' nostalgia with the first one. Game has to succeed now on the merits of the first, which people remember more than BG.

No idea how that will play out TBH. I mean, truth be told, I've never believed for a moment that Sawyer would get his game made at Obsidian. And now that Tim Cain and Leon Boyarski are back, it's even less likely because these two are practically golden children in the community.

So here's a thing: if this thing fails to live up to internal expectations, which is AAA sales as evidenced by Upper Mgmt doing full voice work AND dumbing down the game for a broader audience (the latter of which has time and again proven to lead to shit as you neither appealing to the masses nor your fanbase and succeed instead in alienating both with stale tapwater), what happens to Sawyer? Does he leave and go somewhere else? How much freedom did he have to fuck with this game?

 

[Roguey]

PoE2 wasn't really "dumbed down" though, Roguey. Honestly anyone who claims it was is just edge-lording with a bit of try-harding. The VO thing tracks, though.

The removal of strategic elements like health and vancian casting is dumbing down, as is the move from six-member parties to five. Additionally, it appears to be a consensus that PoE 2 is significantly easier than PoE across the board (though admittedly I haven't seen anyone clarify if they mean 1.0 or 3.0).

 

[aweigh]

Funny, when I bring those things up concerning Wizardry people say those mechanics are "outdated", and their removal in Bradley games were incline.

Ain't life strange.

 

[Major_Blackhart]

What are the odds that if things don't go well and the environment gets toxic at Obsidian, will Sawyer pull an Avellone and strike out on his own? I don't know if he really has the cred for it like Avellone, or Cain or Boyarski really.

 

[Roguey]

Funny, when I bring those things up concerning Wizardry people say those mechanics are "outdated", and their removal in Bradley games were incline.

Ain't life strange.

It appears as though there's multiple camps here. Some people would rather have purely tactical combat because they find the illusion of strategic gameplay annoying, and then there's those who just outright hate strategic gameplay and don't want it in their RPGs at all.

 

[Sacred82]

I think your feeling that the sale are affected by the dumb down are skewed by your bias.

If it didn't, Bethesda and Bioware wouldn't have been trying so hard to do it all these years.

anticipatory obedience doesn't mean there would be consequences if you didn't give in to it.


People will and can only buy what's available. What draws crowds when it comes to video games is muh graphix, people will generally be interested if you show them some pretty pictures. Escalating complexity will scare people away, but there's a threshold that you don't need to cross to sell your game even to more casual gamers. Dumbing things down even further because of a limited number of complaints that register with you may not be a solid strategy in the long run.


'Easy to grasp = good' (when it comes to sales) doesn't mean 'more easy = more gooder'.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Sharp drop in sales after the first game was expected, especially after Torment bombed, and anyone who predicted otherwise is off his tits.

Like Felipepe already mentioned, PoE1 only seemed well received, but the completion rates tell a very different story. The reality is that of all the Kickstarter games, only Divinity managed to build a true, dedicated audience, while most of the buyers of other games were riding on the "fuck the publishers" bandwagon and didn't actually bother to play what they bought..

It's certainly an irony that a much better game is struggling to move units, while a half-assed attempt like PoE 1.0 sits at a million copies. But it's only natural that the market had to correct until isometric RPGs find what their real audience is.

Either way, there's a no reason for all this hysteria. It will continue to sell I'm sure, as the reception has been excellent and the patches and fixes will only help. And part 3 shouldn't be in danger either.

The real question is where do we go after the inevitable PoE3 (and WL3) come out. Will these games die off again? Certainly looks like a possibility. If Obsidian want to avoid it, the first thing to do is to drop the cancer that is RtWP and go TB which is actually having a bit of renaissance right now.

 

[Major_Blackhart]

Feargus does not seem to be a learning animal, and believes that games like BG succeeded because of RTwP, not in spite of it.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Feargus does not seem to be a learning animal, and believes that games like BG succeeded because of RTwP, not in spite of it.

I'm sure they all know RTwP is a problem, look at the amount of effort in PoE2 to make combat more readable.

It's just that you can't exactly ask people for money to make BG successor and make it turn-based.

 

[Urthor]

It's also released later in the year.

I do wonder if earlier is just better for quarter 1 and quarter 2 results, Kingdom Come got released super early and was fully capable of building a hype train because there was little else competing for attention. In May, Obsidian is doing better than Tyranny but worse than Battletech for example, you wonder if it's simply eating the dust of Battletech picking up customers who are still playing battletech and all those other games for example, and on the horizon is E3 which is fairly prominent in gamers' minds.

It's still a better release date in Tyranny but I would not be surprised if we start seeing a trend of February releases being the most profitable time for indie RPGs when they cash in on the attention that comes with dropping your game in the most barren part of the calendar, ahead of other releases.

 

[CyberWhale]

TBH this game had pretty terrible marketing. Instead of making proper Let's Plays with big YouTubers/Twitchers/gaming sites they released short video updates on tumblr/twitter/whatever.
Not to mention that the game reviews weren't even put on the main page, you literally had to open the Review section on GameSpot to know that the game came out.
Also terrible launch trailer.

P.S. I don't mind full voice over in an isometric game, but I don't think it is the best investment if you want to get your money back.

 

[Major_Blackhart]

My thing is use RTwP on PoE. That's fine. But other isometric games? What is it that Tim and Len are working on? Is that RT or RTwP? It sure as shit ain't TB.

I always got the opinion that Feargus never wanted to do RPGs. At least not the type that he's doing now. I always got the idea he wanted Obsidian to be Bioware. Or something else. Big AAA titles, advertising budgets, all that shit.