thelee

Which thread would this actually be? Only thing I've heard is that the Director of Marketing was fired due to sales, this was a clause in his contract even. I mean, given how relatively little buzz there has been about Deadfire, firing the director of marketing seems completely correct.

Just as an update, as of 3.1.1 I also discovered the Chornu and Biakara bounty ship boarding fights suffer from the same issue of having the dialogue incorrectly attributed to mainchar instead of the enemy pirate.

Whelp, this is it y'all. The final nail to the coffin. I don't think Micro$oft will ever waste their budget by allowing Obsidian to create another niche, top-down crpg. However, there is some light in the other side of the tunnel since Obsidian's finally gonna have the financial support needed for another AAA rpg. I just hope Micro$oft doesn't screw them over again... MSFT like any business is in the industry for getting as much returns off of their investment. Small, niche RPGS can provide outsize returns on top of helping their business strategy by providing incentives for platform lock-in via exclusives. As a plus, they have the resources to properly market and focus test a product (which sounds like Deadfire could really have benefited from). MSFT also has the resources to back a huge AAA game. With Obsidian a part of MSFT, the likelihood we'll ever see another Fallout: New Vegas type game has gone to zero (albeit from infinitesimal low odds to start), but at least now we have a chance for a F:NV-like AAA game in the future. I was around the 90s to know MSFT at the peak of its bureaucratic acqui-existinguish model, the MSFT under current CEO seems to be a bit better. I'll start getting worried if we start seeing an outflux of talent, though tbh with JE Sawyer semi-retired I'm already a little bit skeptical of game design going forward.

1. Have a quicksave before a ship fight. 2. Do ship fight. 3. Quickload in the middle of the fight. 4. Repeat N times. 5. Finally beat the ship. 6. Get N +10 morale bonuses in the top-right corner. Something is clearly not being reset correctly on a quickload. Dropbox link to a quicksave before a ship fight, plus output_log: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/jjdf9q96utop3rz/AACVe7t8pcj85UZB44wUPBiEa?dl=0

Back on topic, my 2c about latest god challenges after playing with them a bit. Hylea's: mentioned in the Vela thread that I like this a bit more now that I've played the game more. My only fault for it is that it doesn't change the core gameplay enough. It makes enemy rogues, bounce spells, reckless aoe more dangerous, makes it harder to reposition, and makes withdraw MVP, but i also wish vela did a little more child-like things during combat (maybe occasionally running around and not just cowering) for the extra heat. I do like the extra chatter she adds from time to time. Rymrgand: actually like this quite a bit. sort of helps deal away with the rest spamming problem because the really valuable foodstuff doesn't last long so you really want to avoid resting once you get some good rest bonuses. i like how alcohol lasts a really long time (14 days), gives it extra value over similar foods at the cost of hangovers (also nice immersive touch since sailors loved carrying some grog/rum on board). i also like how salt and spices have no expiration, nice immersive touch. also makes finding fresh fruit and water while out and about more valuable since each instance of food you find is time-tracked distinctly. i might find this more annoying in the late game (when it becomes harder to keep all ingredients fresh enough to craft shark soup for example) or in certain setups (kith meat is very rare until shimmering isle which means corpse-eater really has to hoard that rest bonus). the one thing i really wish was the ability to ---> rest and eat food anywhere <--- because sometimes i want to buy some nice ingredients which only last 1 day, but i have to leave town before i can set up camp and make use of them, which is a slightly annoying extra step. the fact that i can't hoard food anymore meant that I actually had to somewhat map out my act 1 adventures so i could make sure i could get to port maje and get some hirelings and eat food before my captain's banquet from the start of the game all expired, which was an interesting logistical challenge (basically no rest, beeline straight for port maje skipping the dawnstars encounter until after resting). all things being said, I put this on my "more fun that I thought"/"pleasant surprise" along with skaen's challenge, and i feel like both this and skaen i'd probably flip on more often than not in any future runs.

makes sense; i'm pretty sure this played a huge factor in the lack of buzz around Deadfire. It's also I think a main contributor to why Avellone is grousing about mismanagement for Deadfire sales. (Feargus is both Obsidian head and Fig boardperson and probably pushed Deadfire to crowdfund on Fig instead of Kickstarter)

The 1.2m comes from a data leak from steam -- you can google around for some articles (it was talked about on arstechnica in july) and download the linked .csv dump and look up numbers yourselves. It's not completely accurate, because it excludes console sales and GoG sales and free gift copies that backers had, but it's at least a good approximation (arstechnica vetted some of the numbers they could to verify the relative accuracy). In the SEC filings (which are completely accurate under penalty of fraud), as of dec 2017 they had ~960k unique sales (they don't count console sales; they just get licensing fees iiuc). It doesn't seem unlikely to me that in seven months (which included several big promos as well as Deadfire launch for renewed interest) they might have gotten some number shy of 200k, plus backers, to get the 1.2m steam number.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/obsidian/project-eternity 70k backers Deadfire: https://www.fig.co/campaigns/deadfire 33k backers (the rest were "investors" who don't get a copy of the game)

when it comes to pets, the party-wide effect is always weaker than the mainchar-only effect. in this case, nalvi gives you a much smaller improvement to armor recovery than epsilon or pirate cosmo (albeit it gives it to everyone). you can lean that way if you want, but this class is such a glass cannon you really want to be selfish with the armor recovery reduction. also, in more recent versions of the game (due to consumables nerf), we don't actually want too much extra resolve because it hurts our ability to distract ourself (either with powder burns or sparkcrackers). if you're not going that route, then maybe the +1 resolve is decent. 34% for 55% armor just for PC vs 38% for 55% armor for everyone. IF soloi then sure, but with an entire party? I think the latter is preferable. What do you think? Also looking forward to more guides, like Cipher/x Druid/x etc. Great work. Possibly. It really depends on the rest of your party. I tend to value +stride bonuses significantly (Epsilon in current revision of guide is recommended over Cosmo Pirate/Abraham) because of the huge survivability boost they can give your squishies. One thing to be aware of is the difference between nalvi and epsilon's armor recovery when it comes to using miscreant's leather. when you have nalvi equipped the advantage is so slight over just wearing cloth that you might be rather using actual cloth with other bonuses, e.g. vatnir's harbinger robes. (that would make this build even more glass cannon-y)

What I meant was, PoE1 had a big hook, "Hey everyone a spiritual successor to a beloved game!". People flocked to the new game. Then they received it...and using myself as an example, maybe felt that the only resemblance to the BG series was the isometric view or some other minor similarity? I have a hard time believing that the developers changed the mechanics in PoE2 for the lulz, so imo, PoE2 shifted because of what the data showed about how players were engaging the game. It still feels like if people were let down so much by PoE1 it wouldn't have climbed all the way to 1.2m in sales and have such decently high user reviews (if a bit lower than metacritic). So far only Boeroer's theory above seems to make sense given the other data points we actually have.

it's not that hard actually. I may not have bought the game but I might have played it in a friends place as a demo experience. It may not give me an idea of the full story but I can see the changed mechanics and naval stuff Number of people who had such experience is minimal. People don't always have friend with "demo experience of their next gaming purchase". POE1 sucked. POE is nice little game, but it sucked anyways. It lack charm and it takes itself way too seriously. Not because of humor, but some of stuff was heaaaavy as hell. Heavy experience like burden to play. I can definitely see why people skipped POE2. if a lot of people thought that, it would be reflected in user reviews. i'm not saying there don't exist people who thought PoE1 sucked (like yourself), and it's clear that user reviews are a little lower than critic reviews as a result, but it's by far not a big enough chunk to really explain the sales drop.

Thinking about Tyranny, a silver lining here: (this is based on me paying way too much attention to my guides' hits/day over the past few days; it's somewhat anecdotal and i'm just one data point so take with a grain of salt) - when tyranny first came out and i first put out my tyranny guide, it had really crappy traction. it was sort of demoralizing actually, enough so that i basically stopped actively updating it (it didn't help that I didn't love tyranny). - paying attention to the numbers, though, my tyranny hits/day has actually grown to be my third most popular guide on gamefaqs. this is a stark reversal of the trend of every other game I have a guide for, which is an early surge that tapers off with some varying level of long-tail support (BGEE and PoE1 have great long-tail support and are by far my two most popular guides in terms of long-term support; by contrast my Bioshock Infinite had insane hits/day at first and has basically 0 now). this is actually enough that i'm feeling like i need to go back and play tyranny again with some of the DLC I skipped, just to provide support for my own guide which I personally don't feel deserves the traffic it's getting right now. similarly, my BGEE guide actually had a random surge at some point in its lifetime... i could never figure out why, but I figured there must've been some sale or promotion that happened at that time. It's possible when Paradox expressed their Tyranny disappointment Tyranny really was doing really crappily with sales numbers, but given enough long-term support a game can develop some good long-tail traction. It's probably not what Obsidian wanted for Deadfire, but I can only hope that their apparent dedication to the game into 2019 will keep sales and fans flowing in for the game. edit - all these numbers ignore varying guide quality and demographics who may or may not use gamefaqs, but I personally like to think my quality is fairly consistent so changes in popularity instead tend to be correlated with current size of an active fanbase for a game.

Perhaps. This seems to support a random comment I made in another thread which suggests that a possible PoE3 should be heralded as a "return-to-form" (with per-rest system, more traditional high fantasy) that happens to have Deadfire multiclassing added in. Personally I agree with most of JE Sawyer's changes to the pillars system, but ultimately the customer is always right.

I am inclined to say nobody really has engagement unless they have + engagement gear or modals equipped or turned on, i.e. the base value is 0 (despite the fact that these character can still flank), perhaps with some exceptions. Cotta, for example, who is a ranger and appears to have an axe + stiletto in one slot and a crossbow in the other, engages alright, while Maia, also a ranger, does not. Maybe he is ranger/something, but that would be for another thread. I'd go so far as to say that this is one of the biggest things that can trip someone up comign from PoE1. It definitely took me a while to realize that enemies were running around easily because in contrast to PoE1 in Deadfire no one starts with any engagement (the only "free" universal source of engagement in Deadfire is equipping a shield).

sounds like fun. would definitely have to script a lot of that self-buffing away though or else it could get real tedious real fast. FWIW my blackjacket+streetfighter build basically put a blunderbuss in each of 4 weapon slots and used quick switch to switch to an un-fired blunderbuss as necessary to trigger powder burns, with zero delay. not as much peak damage as the zealot here or i'm sure the spellblade there, but frequently found it to be a "good enough" way to sustain heating up uptime for a long time (and just relied on heavy armor for survivability); worked well with mob stance to boot. streetfighter is just a fun subclass that rewards you for metagaming even just a little bit.

Funnily enough, Magic: The Gathering recently did their own "colonialism and pirates" set (Ixalan and Rivals of Ixalan) and from what I can tell it was also much less popular than e.g. Dominaria (more traditional M:TG setting). What's wrong with sailing and pirates? *feels alone*

(possible spoilers) The main plot in Deadfire is interesting in that regard. Reminded me of Raiders of the Lost Ark; in that movie, Indiana Jones ends up being completely superfluous. He fails to prevent the ark from falling into Nazi hands, and when the Nazis open it, divine power annihilates them all anyway. He was basically just there for the ride. Or, "the adventure was the friends we made along the way" kind of after-school special message. Similarly, in contrast to PoE1's message of the coming animancy revolution and impending obsolescence of the gods (read: they blew up eothas), Deadfire's message is like "oh ho ho not yet you dumb non-engwithan mortals" and it's more about the factions you interact with along the way to Eothas's unstoppable plan. That's why I really want a PoE3 to bring everything to a conclusion because there's clearly a tension between the old gods and kith progress that needs to be resolved.

Still dont get it. If it sold $4m (even if part of it was investors (not half of it by the way)) it still made a lot of money in a niche market. If I recall correctly it made more than double of what POE did in the campaign (even discounting the investors). If we are talking about a niche market (number of players are low/restricted) then we might assume the majority of it backed the game in the campaign since it made more money than POE. If the majority of the player base already backed the game, sure it will sell less afterwards... Sorry, I don't think that's even close. PoE1 raised 4m, too, PoE2 just did slightly better and half that was "investors" (2.25m) Lifetime sales as of December 2017 for PoE1 was 16m, not counting it's original 4m funding, not counting 2m more from DLCs. I don't see how in any world you could rationalize Deadfire's current trajectory as comparable.

Deadfire is really a game that you have to approach like a lawyer, paying attention to very very specific wording

Anecdotally, I heard way less buzz with Deadfire than with PoE1. The reason? Beats me. Possibly hubris.

everyone's entitled to their own opinion, but serafen? seriously? says a lot more about you i think. are you insane? that was pointless filler that was a waste of utter time that was there just to fulfill some backer pledges. once i realized all those gold-plated names had no bearing on the story whatsoever i was just like "Eff this" (some friends who also played PoE1 were similarly like "Wtf").

It will be paid out on nett revenue- ie revenue after relevant deductions- not the gross revenue. If that weren't the case I would be extraordinarily surprised and question whether OEI had got decent, or any, accounting and legal advice. It will be set up to minimise payments to investors, that's just the reality of being a company rather than a charity and the investment only being shares in a product rather than shares in a company. Exactly how that nett revenue is counted and what can be deducted about it will depend on the exact definitions and terms used, but I'd bet pretty much everything I own that the 4.5 million is after they've deducted every single expense and cost they can. Fig is a pretty bad investment for sure, though I do believe that OEI did genuinely think they would get those numbers and it would be successful, as they put a decent amount of extra money in themselves. SEC filings says "gross revenue" everywhere and defines it very specifically. Granted there are some spots that to me look like typos, but the difference between "Gross revenue" and "net revenue" is pretty severe and it would be pretty bad (legally or financially speaking) if they messed it up. They do distinguish between "gross receipts" (gross revenue minus distributor's cut) and "gross revenue" but the reverse calculation that leads to 4.5m definitely accounts for the difference between gross receipts and gross revenue (it's 192.67 / (.7 * .16 * .85 / 2250)) where the ".7" is accounting for the distributor's cut. edit - Obsidian probably thought that PoE1 numbers were achievable, but the graph of the 500k break-even point is still really overly optimistic. I mean, it's completely normal practice for companies to use only optimistic assumptions in their projections, but there tends to be a reason why investors don't advise laypeople to make these kinds of investing decisions on their own.

berserker + smoke cloud is an interesting idea. i might have to test rolling one soon because that might be an easy way to trigger it (at the cost of some guile). I was talking about disoriented -> distracted because i thought i had accounted for every possible distracted effect my own hubris, since i clearly didn't think about confusion + party-friendly distraction effects.

man, i've wasted too much time on this. i guess my parting shot is that nothing anyone can say (including myself) changes the following bullet points: - Deadfire is selling less well than PoE1 - only Obsidian knows the specific numbers and the best guess we got is probably high 100k, closer to 200k - it's anyone's guess as to why it's selling less well - only Obsidian knows if Deadfire is tracking expectations or not edit: one more bullet point - fig shares has always been and continues to be a rotten deal for people. the pretty graph that showed a breakeven point at 500k-ish copies relied on an unchanging average sales price of 45 USD. any amount of discounting or international sales would significantly start reducing that sales price, and similarly stretch how many sales you'd need to hit breakeven. (if deadfire settles on an average sales price of ~26 like PoE1 you'd basically need to sell as well as PoE1 just to get your money back.) it also excludes console sales (which the PoE1 numbers include) and DLC sales. Welcome to America, buyer beware.

so i have to modify some things i said; i had to go look up the steam data leak from earlier this summer just to verify some things. A. tyranny did not sell that poorly, all things considered. the total number of players was 560k. this is not necessarily number of sales since it just counts players who have ever played the game, but for a non-crowdfunded game it's somewhat close. i don't know where i got the 60k number from. it might have been an initial release number or something. sorry about the error. B. deadfire might have higher sale counts and much lower unit sales price. i don't know why i remember something like 108k from the data leak, but the data from july 1st data leak was 200k players. a good number of this is backers and their free copies, but even allowing for that, i think 125k is on the low side of actual sales combined with sales from GoG. C. poe1 had 1.2m players. a small portion of this is backers and their free copies. it probably has a much lower per-unit sales price at this point due to all the discounted sales that have happened since its release From SEC filings (dec 2017, seven months before C above): as of the time they were written, poe1 had revenues to obsidian of about 16.5m on sales of about 900k, which accounting for a 30% distributor's cut amounts to an average sales price of 26 bucks per copy. (this excludes white march which alone contributed 2m more) Anyway, reddit calculations relies on using the base USD sales price with some discounting as a starting point. Upon going through this stuff this is a very bad starting point, actually, because this is an international game, and the base price can be as little as 14 USD for someone buying in Russia. (EDIT - I missed that Zoraptor ninja-ed me on this point above.) I think we can definitely say that there's 4.5m in gross revenue, but the actual sales is still probably going to all over the place. I think it's safe to say that we're actually closer to 200k in terms of sales including GoG than we are to 100k. Definitely slower than PoE1. Tyranny took almost two years and lots of sales to get to 560k, Deadfire is 1/3 of the way there in 1/4 of the time with minimal discounting so far... maybe it can do better? i'm actually surprised that tyranny did so well, considering that paradox themselves considered it disappointing. 560k for a niche style of a niche genre is not shabby in my book; i guess they were expecting PoE1-style numbers?