I concur with the people that said deadfire didn't really sell to the degree Obsidian expected because many people who bought pillars of eternity 1 didn't really like or even play pillars of eternity 1. its really that simple.
The original pillars came out around the time of a nostalgia wave from people like me who were 90s teens who played too much Baldur's Gate and wanted a grand adventure real time with pause game like those, however when pillars actually came out they found they didn't like this gameplay conceit so much anymore. it was clunky, immersion ruining, awkward, a relic, and so on. turn based is just clearly superior, they said. A shift in taste that is kind of amazing if you gamed at all in the late 90s while diablo and RTS ruled the universe and being able to real time multitask just showed how much more intellectually superior you were but i digress. i have always preferred turn based and currently do a lot of gloomhaven so i'm perfectly aware that turn based can be more thoughtful and fun but criticizing a game pitched and produced to be a successor to infinity engine games for being real time with pause is kind of like complaining that a wes anderson movie would have been better off if it was grim & gritty.
I think a lot of people bought pillars 1 because of critical reviews and high ratings. I know some who never really played it purchased it because of baldur's gate nostalgia and when they fired up the new game they were like ah, yeah, i'm so over this. A lot of people just simply didn't understand the way the game was made because they didn't ever play Baldur's Gate and had no nostalgia for it. they simply just don't want to read too much and think that its 'bad writing' (phrases like wall-of-text or text vomit), they don't want to explore much on their own (complaints of 'pointless' wilderness maps), need quest markers to find things, and so on. Contemporary gamers need games to have simple stories with unambiguous universal morals, quippy dialogue, action packed and full of avatar customization drops and cheevos for them to stay invested. As we all get older and many of us have careers and families to spend time on, under 30s are going to be the main people who buy games and will make your game successful by turning it into an ubiquitous meme, especially games that aren't multi-million dollar, football game ad packaging, casual-oriented pick up and play for 30 mins and put them down again AAA cross-platform titles. So if you're shooting for big sales numbers this is the demographic you have to appeal to. if you're making arty indie games for old people who like to read with modest sales goals, like weather factory does, you'll have more "success" since that's all based on perception anyway.
This reaction was compounded when deadfire came out because the flavor of the month at that time was divinity original sin 2: a straightforward godmode story in which you were practically encouraged to be batman villain evil with quippy dialogue full of jokes and Easter eggs and to top it all off glorious turn based combat. Go browse the negative reviews of Deadfire on steam from the year or two after it was released and you'll see almost every single one of them cross-promotes D:OS2. I think its interesting nobody has really mentioned DOS2 in this thread. I mean its easy to forget its not like people still talk about it, and Larian seems to be stuck in some kind of early access grift loop with the wholly unnecessary Baldur's Gate 3. At the time it seemed like the consensus verdict from the people who were searching for the objective, definitive reason why the game missed sales expectations was that pillars was a throwback to Baldur's Gate and not built like D:OS2. Perhaps this is true, but that's not a flaw with the game, that was the entire pitch for funding development, which I've already said. The grousing about RtWP in particular became so inescapable here on the obsidian boards that the pillars team literally added a turn based mode at the end of the support cycle in an attempt to appease them.
and frankly, this is a recurring issue. I don't necessarily think this is why it didn't meet sales expectations but I want to dig into this, at the risk of being blathersome. i think pillars series shows the pitfalls of sourcing the community for direct involvement in game design. after the first game was released people complained about the pacing and how boring and dreary the setting was so in deadfire they changed it to make it less "edgy" & more open world, like the Baldur's Gates were. And people complained about that instead, that it wasn't as deep and dark as the first game. And those aren't the only changes made from "community feedback" eg complaining from randos: the backer NPCs were stupid and boring (facts), there's too many spells to choose from, can't multiclass, its not 100% voice acted (ugh), there's too many 'walls of text' (double ugh; its called a paragraph) etc and yet when deadfire came out: what happened to the backer npcs, there's not enough spells, multiclassing is not that good, the dialogue is simplified and the story isn't as compelling, the voice acting is uneven, etc.
the lesson? never make a game based on kickstarter promises and fanbase feedback and wishlisting or you'll be forced to try to please that which is unpleasable. and maybe i'm wrong but thats probably why tyranny performed relatively better, it wasn't saddled with kickstarter promises and backer wishlisting and nostalgia for playing baldur's gate games or pie-in-the-sky sales goals tbh, it was just able to do and be its own thing. it seems like no matter how many changes you make to reflect feedback the negative feedback will flow in against whatever choice you make. its a law of the internet: people who are happy with things don't comment and people who have an axe to grind do.
furthermore i think the sales rumors and perceptions (this game didn't really sell badly, it didn't totally bomb either, its not lawbreakers) tended to have a negative feedback loop for people buying into the game. People, especially mainline gamers, don't like buying unpopular things, they want to play the game that is trending on twitter, stuff they can either play with friends or talk about with friends. That seems to be the main motivation to buy any game in this stage of the social network economy. Not only is there the rampaging Fortnite gorilla, but recall stuff like the brief fleeting infatuation with fall guys leading into the endless punishment of among us. this game didn't trend on twitter. no amount of marketing can make up for the fact that streamers aren't streaming and posters aren't posting. Honestly, would this game even be fun to watch on a stream? I have a hard time imagining it would be, compared to something like GTA, Fortnite or Elden Ring.
At the time, people on here seemed to believe that the perception of low sales meant definitively that it was a bad game and searched out the objective design reasons why it failed which is extremely faulty reasoning. Stuff that isn't broadly popular is not objectively bad, in fact a lot of times the stuff that is broadly popular has attained that popularity at the expense of depth and uniqueness. This game makes a very direct reference to Deep Space Nine by naming the ship the Defiant. Little history lesson from an old person who was there, that show got ragged on by everybody for being boring and not actually star trek because they weren't exploring. yet over time, thanks probably to streaming facilitating binging serials, DS9 has grown to be regarded as one of the best things under the Star Trek brand and one of the earliest examples of the emerging "prestige television" serial.
i said at the time deadfire is peter gabriel genesis: full of great steve hackett riffs, bizarre but heady lyrics, big ambitious ideas it sometimes realizes, totally messy and all over the place, it reaches for things that it can't quite grasp but i like that approach and find it more interesting and laudable than phil collins genesis. thats me tho
Its a good game, its not a great game and it seems to have made money so I'm not sure why anyone should worry about its popularity. Many things greater than this game aren't broadly popular either. And like DS9 or the Velvet Underground maybe it will become more appreciated with age.