Eternity PoE II: Deadfire Sales Analysis Thread

[BEvers]

I'm not familiar with the subject matter, but what other expenses are factored in before the $4.5 million figure is reached?

None. We're calculating gross revenue before the Steam fee or any other expenses, based on the $192.67 dividend per share.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

I'm far more interested in getting an accurate number of players figures. Counting "Feargus' money" (ok, I know it's not his) is secondary for me. And deducting the average price per unit is an exercise that gets increasingly tough to tell how good you did at.

Why do player numbers matter to you?

What do player numbers represent? Individuals interested in this game, and in this type of game. Isn't this also valuable to know?

Calculating a number of people interested in "this type of game" based on PoE II is pretty pointless.

 

[fantadomat]

This is pretty pointless,we estimated pretty accurately the sold copies,made money and the player count a few pages ago. Now people are arguing about few thousands as if it matters. Trying to spin it in a way that it doesn't look that bad.

The game sold around 120-150thousands copies,this is abysmal performance for it. The game have around 60,000 copies that are from backers,the game made around 4 millions in fig backers and had around 30,000 backers from this alone. Many of them had multiple copies of the game. Also the game from what i remember had a kickstarter that also brought backers,could be mistaken tho.

AwesomeButton you did get butthurt when i pointed out that you have no idea about the gnomes in Arcanum . So i will take it as confirmation to my question.

 

[AwesomeButton]

I'm not familiar with the subject matter, but what other expenses are factored in before the $4.5 million figure is reached?

None. We're calculating gross revenue before the Steam fee or any other expenses, based on the $192.67 dividend per share.

When I did the math myself starting from the dividends per share, I arrived at the same ~$4.5 million. Now I get it. But I don't see a reliable enough way to use that ~4.5 million value as a starting point to get to a number of players. If anyone has the patience to explain, please go.

AwesomeButton you did get butthurt when i pointed out that you have no idea about the gnomes in Arcanum . So i will take it as confirmation to my question.

Dude take whatever you want as whatever you want. I made an honest attempt to explain what I mean, but the problem is somewhere between your ears apparently. And no, I hardly care enough about your opinion to be "butthurt" or anything. May be difficult to imagine, but that's it.

 

[ArchAngel]

Daily reminder that PoE1-2 sold less than Shadowrun trilogy.

And less than remastered "enhanced" IE games.

 

[CyberWhale]

Going full autist bookkeeper on the financial status of Fig investors is fun and all, but I think the total number of (paid) serial keys (whether they were from Fig campaign or post-release is irrelevant) should be the referential number when we are talking about sales numbers. That said, I think it was a (financial) failure, and mostly because of the following:

1) visual upgrade - the original didn't look outstanding, but it looked good enough. Sure, PoE2 looks a lot better, but they should have held that out for another title entirely. Going F1>F2 or F3>F:NV route would be decent enough while saving a lot of time and money. Maybe add a little extra color to it, because it occasionally looked pretty drab in the original. Reusing assets is what super-rich companies like Activisions do, so I see no reason why an independent one who barely survives would do otherwise.

2) new systems - spending all that time to patch and balance the original just so you could throw it out in the sequel makes no fucking sense to me. Don't reinvent the wheel (you already did it once when you were creating your own DnD version of rules) again, just build on top of it. PoE ended as 3.0 or whatever, PoE2 should have been 3.5. Evolution instead of revolution.

3) voice acting - I'm not against full VO, on the contrary. Actually, I would like a narrator that reads descriptions and diary entries/books/whatever as well. While people saying that money could be better used are wrong for numerous reasons, spending it makes no sense even if it doesn't hurt the content in any way whatsoever. Why? For the same reason spending that money on better/more content makes no sense as well - isometric cRPGs obviously have a limited audience and going over a certain budget isn't going to improve your investment returns. Stick to voice-over/flavor text for your party members and important NPCs. Use quality voice actors/equipment instead of popular names and quantity.

4) marketing - use publishers like Paradox even if they ask for a larger cut, it will pay out in the end. Going for a smaller one won't help you when your reviewed game doesn't even make it on the front page (happened on GameSpot, the game got a review but if you didn't get to the review section you didn't even know it was released). Create meaningful trailers and walkthroughs (instead of short 10 seconds Tumblr/Twitter shit) that are released and marketed on one main page and then shared through official (game and company) and private (developers) social media channel instead of having Sawyer post unrelated post all over the internet (his private account and some obscure forums) while the Fig page and Obsidian official forums gather dust and look like a fucking ghost town

5) experiment and expend (while using all of the above) - developers themselves said that making long and expensive expansions (pun not intended) isn't commercially viable in this day and age. I believe them. But making a lot of smaller DLCs isn't necessarily either. Just because it works for really big AAA titles doesn't mean it will work for smaller medium budget RPGs as well. Still, developing transmedia IPs that go above and beyond the original title is the norm nowadays, and while some people don't like it, if you want to create a strong IP and name it is pretty much a must. I already said how I would do it, and I'm gonna repeat myself, even tho it seems to be too late even if someone was listening (because of the acquisition and all that). Create smaller stand-alone shorter titles that re-use assets or even whole places to flash out the settings story. Instead of covering a past event in a DLC, create a small title that doesn't feature the same protagonists and doesn't happen in the main series timeline.

• Make a text-heavy adventure without any combat and give Chris Avellone hands-free to do whatever he fucking wants. Maybe a detective stories in one of the two larger cities.
• Make a turn-based strategy in vain of Blackguards where you only have the map and small hand-placed maps and encounters you can only see in combat. Give it to TimCain or whatever.
• Make a map-roaming CYOA that is entirely based on traveling and solving the faction-based conflict of various different cultures by reading those painted text events ala Darklands. Give it to Sawyer so he could sperge about history as much as his heart desires.

Whatever, be creative and make something with already preexisting assets that it simple enough so even someone who hasn't played the main series can enjoy. There are a lot of indie titles like this, and similar projects could not only be financially viable to fill the void while you're waiting for the next release, they could also be a testing ground for new employees and new ideas. If they become successful, they would also increase IP's value and maybe bring an entirely new audience to the series as well. Win-win-win...

P.S. so yeah, TL;DR, I just wanted to get this out. Simply mind-boggling they've chosen to do things in the way they did. Good luck, and thanks for all the fishes.

 

[santino27]

I have yet to see a calculation that accounts for Feargus skimming off the top to make payments on his secret house in Malibu. Try again, Codex!

 

[Fairfax]

How did you arrive to these numbers?

I divided the gross sales (as strongly implied by the first dividend of ~$193 per Fig share for revenue generated through the end of October) by the potential unit sales you threw out there to arrive at a back of the envelope average selling price for each level. This is not coming out of anyone’s ass, it’s coming out of Fig’s dividend announcement and Obsidian’s offering document. If they’re lying, Feargus is going to prison for fraud.

Gross revenue / units sold = ASP

$4.5 million gross/150,000 = $30 ASP
$4.5 million gross/100,000 = $45 ASP

We know the game generated roughly $4.5 million in gross sales through the end of October, again unless Feargus is defrauding his investors. If most of those sales were in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and wealthy Northern Europe, (Obsidian’s poll would suggest roughly 80%), where the game has sold for roughly $37.50 at its greatest discount to $50 at full price, it’s hard to see how they get to 150,000 buyers (potentially bringing the total players up to 200,000 with backers, slacker backers, and those backer tiers who got multiple copies). There would simply be a lot more money.

If we assume an ASP at the midpoint for countries with strong regional pricing, that means roughly 80% of buyers paid around $43.75 (and this assumes Fig backers don’t get any extra money from people who buy the deluxe or obsidian editions, which sounds wrong to me, but then again Feargus is a sneaky prick).

100,000 units at an average of $43.75 brings us to gross sales of $4,375,000 (this would only be the 80% of buyers mentioned above), so the 25,000 from the rest of the world would’ve had to pay an average price of roughly $5. Strikes me as low, but it brings you to 125,000.

Given the actual prices in the extremely developed world, Deadfire would’ve had to gross substantially more than $4.5 million to sell anywhere near 200,000 copies, even including backers. Based on what they’ve disbursed to Fig backers, the only way that’s possible is if Fig/Obsidian are committing a crime.

Using the same geographical data from PoE1, PoE2's weighted average price would be around $45.29 at full price. 4.55% of PoE1 owners were from countries not listed in that chart I posted. Many are from the EU, I assume, others from countries with a lower price. Let's say half were from countries where the price is close to $45, the other half from poor countries where the game costs around $25. The average price would be ~$44.82. However, PoE2 had a lot more translations IIRC, so let's assume it was even more successful in countries with a lower price and call it $40.

The game had a -15% discount in the summer sale, -20% in August, and -34% in September. There's no way to estimate the percentage of owners who bought the game at a discount. For the sake of argument, let's say 50% bought it at a discount. 8.5% in each of the first two sales, 33% in the last one, which had the bigger discount. This would bring the final average price down to ~$34.3, or 154,650 copies sold.

A 6% refund rate is considered normal:

A few developers commented that a 6% return rate is about normal for Steam, but it can spike to 10% during sales.

It's a buggy game, so I doubt it's lower than the average.

According to the Fig campaign page, every tier from $149 and above got at least one additional copy. That adds 3k extra copies to the 34k backers.

Still, even with all these things considered and a bunch of optimistic assumptions, the numbers don't tally with the 203k from achievement data.

• Though some factors inflate the number of players, there are many owners who never started the game.
• That 203k figure didn't even included GOG. D:OS had 15% of its sales from GOG, PoE2 should be somewhere around that at least. The 203k figure didn't include GOG, but Fig's revenue does.
• It was a number from July, before the biggest discounts and less than 2 months after launch.

The game has definitely sold more than the dividends would suggest, so what explains the disparity? We did forget one factor: Versus Evil. The offering circular mentions that DRIL may share revenue with co-publishers, and that such arrangements would reduce Fig's revenue:

The terms of the Pillars of Eternity II License Agreement differ from the terms of certain other license agreements between Fig and developers in that, under the Pillars of Eternity II License Agreement, Fig’s revenue share is equal to a percentage of the revenue DRIL receives, and DRIL retains the ability to enter into separate license agreements with other co-publishers, which could reduce the revenues DRIL receives and thereby indirectly reduce Fig’s revenue share.

Under the Pillars of Eternity II License Agreement, Fig’s revenue share is equal to a percentage of the revenue DRIL receives, and DRIL retains the ability to enter into separate license agreements with other co-publishers. As a result, if DRIL were to take steps on its own that resulted in it receiving lower game revenues, for example by entering into one or more additional co-publishing arrangements with third parties under which DRIL incurred obligations that were greater than any additional revenue earned, then Fig’s revenue share from Pillars of Eternity II would indirectly be reduced. Although Fig believes that the arrangement under the Pillars of Eternity II License Agreement will not adversely affect Fig’s revenue share from Pillars of Eternity II, because Fig does not expect DRIL to take steps that might reduce DRIL’s revenues from Pillars of Eternity II, including by entering into one or more additional co-publishing arrangements with third parties, there can be no assurance that, under the arrangement, DRIL’s game revenues will not go down and Fig’s revenue share thereby indirectly be reduced.

It also explicitly says there's no guarantee that DRIL won't underpay Fig, and that Fig won't try to check the books:

Under the Pillars of Eternity II License Agreement, DRIL will collect most or all of the receipts from distributors from the sale of Pillars of Eternity II, net of distributor fees, and then allocate such receipts among itself, Fig and any third-party co-publisher(s) that DRIL has engaged to publish Pillars of Eternity II. There can be no assurance that the arrangement will not lead to nonpayment or underpayment to Fig of its Pillars of Eternity II revenue share. Under the Pillars of Eternity II License Agreement, DRIL is required to maintain, and to cause Obsidian to maintain, books and records reasonably sufficient to permit verification of its payments of receipts to Fig, and Fig may examine these books and records. However, in the ordinary course of the business relationship under the Pillars of Eternity II License Agreement, DRIL’s collections and payments of receipts will not be subjected to audits or other third-party verification efforts that are conducted for Fig’s benefit. In addition, although DRIL may have audit rights with some of the distributors from which it will receive receipts from sales of Pillars of Eternity II, disputes with distributors regarding their payments could harm relationships with the distributor and could be costly and time-consuming to pursue. As a result, it may not be commercially feasible for DRIL to verify payments made to it by distributors.

So what's Fig's protection against that?

DRIL will deliver to Fig 5,000 valid Steam game keys for Pillars of Eternity II (the “Fig Keys”) on the PC Licensed Platforms (or such other keys format as mutually agreed) no later than 14 days from the commercial launch of Pillars of Eternity II. The Fig Keys will be solely owned by Fig and will be used for the sale of Pillars of Eternity II by Fig on Fig.co, or by any distributors that Fig has engaged to distribute Pillars of Eternity II and that DRIL has pre-approved. The price offered for purchase of the Fig Keys will not at any point in time be less than the then current price of Pillars of Eternity II on Steam. In the event that DRIL underpays the amounts owed to Fig under the Pillars of Eternity II License Agreement, Fig shall have full rights and license to sell, at Fig’s sole discretion, an amount of Fig Keys through any distributor, and retain 100% of the sales receipts of those sales sufficient to offset any underpaid amount.

tl;dr: investors and Fig got fucked, Obsidian DRIL's owners covered their asses and will be fine.

 

[lophiaspis]

You forgot (7) go back in time and make PoE not suck.

 

[AwesomeButton]

tl;dr: investors and Fig got fucked, Obsidian DRIL's owners covered their asses and will be fine.

Does this make calculating the number of players from the gross revenue of $4.5 million somewhat less reliable?

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

What did Versus Evil actually do? Marketing was non existent.

 

[CyberWhale]

You forgot (7) go back in time and make PoE not suck.

Eh, even if it didn't suck most people who bought it wouldn't have bought the sequel. The first was riding the wave of nostalgia-driven Kickstarters, so both the initial crowdfunding and post-release sales were larger than excepted and many people contributed because of herd-mentality and hype. It was popular and people were impulse-buying it.

Should have just made what they've always done, make a cheap and safe but content-heavy sequel while using already pre-existing tools. They've done it with KOTOR II, with New Vegas, and many key people have done it with Fallout 2. Why they didn't just do it again is, like I said above, mind-fucking-boggling.

Also marketing.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

Eh, even if it didn't suck most people who bought it wouldn't have bought the sequel.

That's a pretty weird assumption to make.

 

[fantadomat]

use publishers like Paradox

Tranny sold terribly,maybe even worst than deadfire.

 

[CyberWhale]

Zboj Lamignat I've literally explained it the sentence after. People nowadays buy hyped games because they want to stay in touch with what everybody else is doing. They don't play or sometimes even try them. Only a really small minority finishes the game. When the sequels come out they say:

1) own the original, didn't try it - will buy this maybe one day after I try out the original
2) oh, I've played the original but I don't have time to finish it - will buy this maybe one day after I finish the original
3) played and didn't like it - a small hardcore audience

It doesn't matter how good a game you make, a certain type/genre of a game simply won't sell in huge numbers nowadays.

use publishers like Paradox

Tranny sold terribly,maybe even worst than deadfire.

Tranny would have sold badly either way. There is just something off-putting about that game, I can't even put it in words properly.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Should have just made what they've always done, make a cheap and safe but content-heavy sequel while using already pre-existing tools. They've done it with KOTOR II, with New Vegas, and many key people have done it with Fallout 2. Why they didn't just do it again is, like I said above, mind-fucking-boggling.

Yeah - with engine, lore, systems and efficient pipeline already in place, with a team already familiar with technology, they could quickly dish out a cheap sequel that is basically a big PoE1 mod. But there's one problem - they would never be able to get away with that. Deadfire gathered bigger crowdfunding budgets than the first game, it had to have something to show for it. First question in every review would be - where the fuck did our money go?

Plus it's not like I'm gonna complain that they were over ambitious, I got a much better game out of it. If it didn't pay off with increased revenue, that's hardly my problem.

 

[Fairfax]

tl;dr: investors and Fig got fucked, Obsidian DRIL's owners covered their asses and will be fine.

Does this make calculating the number of players from the gross revenue of $4.5 million somewhat less reliable?

Yes. Versus Evil takes an undisclosed cut, and DRIL might have other deals that reduce Fig's revenue.

 

[fantadomat]

where the fuck did our money go?

Same could be said for Deadfire,the game lacks a lot of content and it is smaller than the first one. Most of the factions and quests chains are superficial and you could clearly see places with cut content.

 

[TalesfromtheCrypt]

What is DRIL?

 

[Fairfax]

What is DRIL?

Dark Rock Industries Limited is a privately held California corporation formed in 2014 (“DRIL”) and the owner of the intellectual property rights associated with Pillars of Eternity II. Obsidian Entertainment, Inc., a privately held California corporation, is a video game development studio based in Irvine, California (“Obsidian”) and an affiliate of DRIL. DRIL is the licensor of Pillars of Eternity II. Obsidian will develop Pillars of Eternity II on behalf of DRIL for delivery to Fig under the Pillars of Eternity II License Agreement.

Obsidian originally owned the intellectual property rights associated with Pillars of Eternity, including the technology used to develop Pillars of Eternity (collectively, the “Pillars IP”). In January 2015 transferred the Pillars IP to DRIL. DRIL has the same owners, with the same percentage ownership interests, as Obsidian, and Feargus Urquhart is the CEO of both companies. DRIL, as intellectual property owner, has previously relied on Obsidian to develop Pillars of Eternity: The White March Parts I and II. It is DRIL’s intention to continue to use Obsidian to develop Pillars IP products.

 

[CyberWhale]

Yeah - with engine, lore, systems and efficient pipeline already in place, with a team already familiar with technology, they could quickly dish out a cheap sequel that is basically a big PoE1 mod. But there's one problem - they would never be able to get away with that. Deadfire gathered bigger crowdfunding budgets than the first game, it had to have something to show for it. First question in every review would be - where the fuck did our money go?

There is truth in what you say - people like new things and ideas more than something concrete. Still, even though the complete gathered amount would have probably been smaller, it would still gather enough. RPG crowd is a little different and selling more content would have probably worked out as well. Plus, I think you're underestimating two factors 1) the time for RPG crowdfunding was good and every bigger project got more and more money and 2) investors whose contribution probably wasn't small enough to ignore.

On reviews - they would probably complain about the same assets a little, but I don't think they would give a fuck about the money and where it came from.

Plus it's not like I'm gonna complain that they were over ambitious, I got a much better game out of it. If it didn't pay off with increased revenue, that's hardly my problem.

That's good in a short-term, but maybe not necessarily in long term? No more sequels or similar games and so on. Of course, maybe the owners didn't give a crap either way and were going to sell no matter how successful it ended up being.

 

[Sailor Woedica]

What is DRIL?

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

It doesn't matter how good a game you make

I think we just need to agree to disagree.

And I'm not even saying that the things you describe are not a factor, but the weird mental gymnastics some of you people go through to avoid admitting the obvious truth are really amusing.

Blame herd-mentality, hipsters, millennials, women, liberals, whomever. Some of them probably bought PoE, but the game was made possible and became a success because of a big (considering the type of project it was) number of dedicated people who are actual PC gamers and were starved for a proper IE-like crpg. Very few of these people came back for the sequel because PoE, and vast majority of other totally-old-school-crpgs released along the way, was shit. It's as simple as that.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

where the fuck did our money go?

Same could be said for Deadfire.

No it couldn't. The money went to graphics which had massive jump in quality, it went to full VO, it went to tremendously improved itemization, it went to infinitely more complex class development and it went to moving from linear experience into a non-linear one. All of which isn't cheap to do.

 

[CyberWhale]

It doesn't matter how good a game you make

I think we just need to agree to disagree.

And I'm not even saying that the things you describe are not a factor, but the weird mental gymnastics some of you people go through to avoid admitting the obvious truth are really amusing.

Blame herd-mentality, hipsters, millennials, women, liberals, whomever. Some of them probably bought PoE, but the game was made possible and became a success because of a big (considering the type of project it was) number of dedicated people who are actual PC gamers and were starved for a proper IE-like crpg. Very few of these people came back for the sequel because PoE, and vast majority of other totally-old-school-crpgs released along the way, was shit. It's as simple as that.

I could same the same thing - I'm not denying that a relatively large amount of hardcore backers who backed the first game didn't support the sequel, but even if we take the most optimistic figure at around 40k* (and trust me, this is stretching it a bit too far because a lot of late backers WHERE hipsters crowdfunding because HYPE and NOSTALGIA) this still doesn't have enough of an impact to decrease sales so drastically.

*40k figure because of 1) hardcore fans who are early supporters which in this case means crowdfunding and 2) difference between PoE kickstarter (~74k) and PoE2 Fig (~34k).