I think it's not going to do well for a reputation of Obsidian, crowdfounding is okay, but not after such a big success with PoE1. I am convinced that this title is going to be sold well and there's no need of funding it on Kickstarter again. They should work on PoE2 with money they've already earned and then think about a possibility to ask people for help after having done some main contents of the game, not start from scratch. It simply doesn't look well to ask people for money again and again... even if they sold only 100,000 copies of PoE after the release they'll have 4,9mln euros ~ $5,4mln from it, that's a lot. I may be wrong, I don't know much about running a game studio, and I'm not familiar with costs coming out of it. It's just my opinion. Are you guys going to support them again or say "hey, you have the money, it's not fair". Let me know what's your opinion.
Cheers
sorry if there's a similar thread somewhere but I haven't seen it.
A bit too early to talk about whether PoE is a success or not. We would have to see the launch sales first (and so would Obsidian).
Plus, I'm not so sure Obsidian will make 4 millions dollars in sales. And anything below that would mean that Pillars of Eternity 2 would get less funding than the first game. Thus: shorter game, less content, less polish.
I'm positive that fans would be more than happy to give Obsidian more money for the sequel. I mean, look at Shadowrun: Hong Kong. Harebrained Schemes had good sales from previous titles and used the money to fun a new game, but without additional funding some additional content would not be possible (revamped Matrix, better magic system, etc.). And the fans were glad to throw money at the Kickstarter, even though they knew the game would be made with or without the Kickstarter.
A sequel would or rather should cost less to produce than the original. Big money goes into the engine and IP. We have also seen that monster/NPC models can be reused if not tweaked a little to give them a new look in a sequel.
I hope the first game is good. I did not like the game mechanics in the first run of the beta and backed off from it. I am hoping a lot of the feedback was reviewed and addressed in the final game product.