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And exactly because of what you said about the risks in this industry, expecting every single game to have 30% margin is IMHO damaging, as there are only few games which could boast with such a margin in last 6 years. According to Bloomberg, the average profit margin in the video game industry is 17-22%. Over the past six years, Xbox has hit 10-20%. To put that 30% target into more context, Sony's PlayStation division achieved a 16% profit margin in Q1 FY25. Link to mentioned Bloomberg article behind paywall, if anyone owns access to them: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-23/microsoft-pushes-xbox-studios-to-hit-higher-profit-margins

i'm just waiting for them to kiss

I'm hoping that Avowed 2 shows the same growth as Outer Worlds 2, but I am concerned that the improvements don't seem to be increasing sales. Although in retrospect, I'm the target audience for these games, and I still played them on Gamepass instead of paying full price. So I think the business model is more an issue than the quality or marketability of the game.

Menace - This is the new game from the developers of Battle Brothers. The demo came out awhile ago and it was not great for me. You are managing a team of Space Marines. The demo threw you into the middle of a campaign and it was just overwhelming and not clear. It is now in EA, and you can play from the start, which is a much easier way to learn the systems. I enjoyed my first mission and it seems like a solid tactical game. So it's worth picking up if you liked BB and want to support the developers.

Well, yeah, but Avowed I thought has a bit of "Anthem" syndrome of "is that what have you been working on for 7 years?" There is making a behemoth of a crowdpleaser for 5-7 years, and there is making a 2 years in development game for 7 years with multiple reboots. I know nothing of profit margins, but according to articles 30% is highly unusual, with 20% being more common. As to Avowed - I am a bit surprised as initially I thought the world from Obsidian was that it did about as well critically and commercially as they expected. Perhaps the expectation was for it to have better legs then it did.

Noticable improvements with the mods thank you.

You can use the Community Patch (Basic or all of it) right away. The changes it makes are reasonable, unobstrusive and improve the gameplay and balance. Also I nowadays would hate to level up without the unique icons for passive abilities from the CP - because I 'd have to mouseover every passive ability to check which one it actually is. Some few standard icons get reused for a lot in the vanilla game which is a bit annoying imo. I would also highly recommend the Enhanced UI mod (by Spherical), I wouldn't want to play the game without it. It just adds some additional UI bits for more info and tooltips which is really useful without messing with the game mechanics at all.

Hi, your Scout should work well. As backup weapon you can take a bow at first and then use one of Serafen's mortar blunderbusses or Eccea's Arcane Blaster. If you'd want more sustained damage potential instead of a few high accuracy hits from stealth/invisibility you could swap Assassin with Streetfighter and mainly use dual blunderbusses (AoE and regular) with the Powder Burns modal. This added cone damage also distracts you - but this unlocks the Streetfighter's passive which leads to -50% recovery/reloading times and +50% Sneak Attack damage which leads to pretty crazy DPS output.

It's certainly not an unusual length for RPG-Likes that try to be HUGE ASS 100+ hour GAMES (see Kingdom Come 2, Starfield, BG3....) As said, it's one of Obsidians own main objectives to now cut that down to three, four years. Speaking about MS' profit targets, I'm sure they're calculacting that in, but: Pricing a game, any game at 70-80 bucks whilst making it available on Game Pass isn't promoting that game. It's promoting Game Pass first and foremost. Not sure about you guys, but games at that price point have to REALLY win me over (which increasingly fewer of these risk averse big budget games desperate to cater to everyone and their pet hamster do). Else I'd rather buy 2 great indie games and a glorious Pentiment (and still have money to spare for snacks and drinks on top of it). What Raf Colantonio said. Xbox Game Pass ‘damaging’ the game industry, former Xbox dev says inXile's Clockwork Revolution is likely going to face a battle too.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us-cuts-contact-with-polish-parliament-speaker-over-trump-insults-2026-02-05/ MAGA sure are thin skinned.

Avowed could never be Elders Scrolls, because one big part of it being so popular still is it's easy moddability. I don't know why they just can't see this. If you put out your game on Unreal, there won't be any mods. The game will be forgotten in a month. This happens all the time with those games. You need mods, to keep people in the loop. Making mods for Bethsoft games is so incredibly easy that anyone can do it. Sure they sell more on consoles than PC yadda-yadda, but mods in the news are what brings people back over and over. Hell, you just have to look at Skyrim or FNV Nexus. The amount of mods for those games is crazy.

The problem here is MS having a target of 30% profit for their games. So if Avowed/TOW2 came in at 20% profit, which by any measure would be a success story, the mere mention of them "not meeting sales targets" sets off an avalanche of "the games bombed/were a failure" type of unfair asinine comments which undermines those games and Obsidian's reputation. :(

Necro'ing to say that this build was as fun as advertised. Thanks for the work to build and share it. I completed a BPM Triple Crown - kill all the things - run and the poet carried the group! I swapped out chanter for Fury Shaper barbarian, which was slightly less fast (if my math is correct), but equally fun. I found myself not messing much with the imbues because of expert mode, but it ran on auto-pilot for the most part, which is another kind of bonus. @Aestus and @thelee talk about this in their class tier list conversation, but having a strong build that can run well without much micro, is great in RTWP party play, where there is a finite limit to player micro capacity. Great for Megabosses - somewhat trivializes HoW and Belranga, who can be interrupted.

Quest Mechanical Matriarch is bugged. The hidden door in the Automech Production Facility won’t open. I don’t get an ‘open hidden door’ option. I’m playing on PS5. The quest seems to be bugged and I can’t progress. Anyone else with the same problem? I found someone on Reddit with the same issue but no workaround yet I guess. Would be nice if this could get fixed

@thelee After some code debugging, I think this parameter cause the weirdness of Shadowing Beyond, "ClearWhenAttacks": "true", found in statuseffects.gamedatabundle "Shadowing_Beyond_SEInvisible". For "Smoke_Veil_SE_Invisible" this is set to false.

Not only Feargus.... Apparently Chris Parker et all were pushing for it too. That had carried over for far longer though. Avowed wasn't supposed to just channel Obsidian's inner The Elder Scrolls -- it was supposed to do that AND be multiplayer on top of it. If dev cycles and processes wouldn't be an issue, they wouldn't be talking now about trying to shorten them to three or four years as one of the main commitments. From Bloomberg: A few successes later, Urquhart and his co-founders were in talks to sell the business to the company that had almost killed it. During the negotiations with Microsoft, Obsidian’s executives assembled a slideshow presentation for the concept that would become AVOWED, pitched as an ambitious cross between megahits The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Destiny that would allow players to battle monsters together in a massive fantasy world. It was an impressive if unlikely proposition. “My thought when I first saw it was, ‘I don’t think there’s a team on the planet that could execute on this,’” says Josh Sawyer, Obsidian’s studio design director. Two years later, Obsidian stripped out the multiplayer feature, and a year after that it assigned a new director to the project. By the time AVOWED came out, it had been in the works for nearly seven years. Also pretty curious how Feargus now wishes that MS would allow for risky and/or smaller projects to be made still, when it was Josh Sawyer who had to once again (see Project Eternity) battle hard with Feargus to get Pentiment off the ground. He even considered to leave had it fallen through. Credits where credits are due: Back at Interplay, when Feargus suggested to a then little known company called Bioware that they better make their next project a D&D game, he struck Gold. No less as no decent big D&D game had come out in many years before. Otherwise, he really doesn't strike me as somebody that should get too deeply involved on the creative side of things (the other founders aren't as regularly "visible" with wonky decisions, as Feargus is pretty much the public face of Obsidian, but who knows...) You know who should be in charge of all things creative? Whoever came up with the initial idea for say Grounded. Not only does that game cater to a specific niche rather than trying to be a little bit of everything for everyone: "It's ELDER SCROLLS MEETS OBSIDIAN MEETS DESTINY!" (Scope issues aside: A game made for everyone is a game made for no one). Grounded, unlike most recent Obsidian games, also has a distinct hook that nobody else on the market has: "Oh LOOK! It's Honey I Shrunk The Kids -- THE GAME!"