I figured the megathread could do without this topic interrupting all the nuanced discussions of the writing, mechanics, and homosexuality.
A week after release and Steamspy is estimating sales are in the
100-200k range. The first one had estimated sales of
200-260k after the same amount of time.
The Sunday after release is pretty much always when you'll see the most players. Deadfire's is 22,723 (reflected at
https://store.steampowered.com/stats/ though not recorded at Steam Charts yet). PoE's was
41,787. Shadowrun Returns beats it with
24,242 and even ELEX barely maintains its German supremacy with
22,871. However, it's not a total flop. Obviously it's doing better than Tides of Numenera and Tyranny, but it also beats Wasteland 2's record of
18,576 and Divinity: Original Sin's record of
21,953 and both of those were pretty successful. Howeverrr they didn't significantly inflate their budgets with full voice acting right out of the gate (though both did eventually, with terrible results
), awesomer graphics (though D:OS is no slouch in this area and Wasteland 2 certainly put in a lot of work to improve them with the director's cut), or use deliberately dumbed-down/streamlined mechanics in a foolish attempt to win over a wider audience. And of course no one is thrilled when a sequel, particularly the first Black Isle/Obsidian sequel not constrained by a slamdunk schedule or budget, doesn't outperform or even match its predecessor.
I suppose Sawyer's now been stripped of his "hitmaker" title, so he won't be getting his turn-based historical RPG. He might have seen the writing on the wall, hence the "I'm burned out and won't be directing projects for a while" and "full voice acting was the
owners' idea, I had nothing to do with it" statements from a while back. I imagine Avellone is pleased that the owners are getting burned, though I'm reasonably confident that his week of forum posts probably only cost them dozens/hundreds/possibly thousands of sales, whereas the gap between what they wanted and what they got is in the hundreds of thousands. 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."