thelee

I highly doubt it. I think also most of the tell-all came after Deadfire was out (that's how I seem to remember the timing because he was blaming low... sales?... on Feargus's insistence on using Fig). I would venture to say if you sampled the PoE1 audience, the vast, vast, vast majority would have no idea who Avellone (or JE Sawyer) even are. Obviously I can't prove this or have the resources to run such a survey, so at this point it's all opinions and buttholes, to paraphrase someone else.

feel free to put together a waterfall diagram of how all these random nit-picky things (including trivially verifiably false things) add up to 600k+ in lost sales. my basic thesis is that a sales miss that large, despite glowing critical and positive audience reviews, indicates something more foundational or market-based at work. edit - JE Sawyer and others at OBS are going to have more access to data anyway; if they can't figure it out I highly doubt anyone here will have the right answer. The recent stuff he shared also provided new info: a) low market awareness leading up to launch b) difficulty getting places to publish marketing pieces c) 3x higher pre-sales rate compared to PoE1, but much lower launch day and after sales To me that reads as "modern IE-style RtWP is too niche or too small a market" (the people who did buy were really excited and really liked it, but they weren't large enough of a market) and poe1 benefited too from being first out of the gate or having unfulfilled nostalgia sales. I like @Gromnir's take of avoiding blame on marketing because it's the easy way out (and apparently point B suggests that OBS tried, but the media just wasn't too interested in the story). in this theory, P:K did well (despite lower critical and possibly audience scores) because it leaned harder into the nostalgia market (which Deadfire lost). D:OS2 did extremely well by being a cRPG without the baggage of RTwP (which may have been a short cultural phenomena when RTSes were also extremely popular)

Not 50. But yes, I do really enjoy Deadfire. But tell me, what fact am i denying that is colored by me liking this game? Please, go through this thread and any other thread discussing Deadfire sales and highlight any factual inaccuracies or logical fallacies. (Hell, I'm the one correcting people about just how low Deadfire sold--lower than they speculate.) I don't claim to know the answer of why Deadfire sold poorly, all I can do is offer my own theories, backed by whatever data I have access to. But if we're trying to explain why Deadfire sold poorly, it's going to have to be a major explanation to explain 600k+ drop (and that is only compared to PoE1 sales, like I mentioned before OBS likely expected to do even better so the drop is even larger). And sorry, as JE Sawyer pointed out, if the game's metacritic score is about as good as PoE1 (and far better than P:K, which sold much better) and audience reviews are good, nit-picky arguments about side quests or other small things are not going to answer that question about the huge sales drop. All you've offered is conjecture that's trivial to verify as not being true. You're almost as bad as the dude chiming in "rage rage Chris Avellone rage rage"

I don't know if you're being willfully obtuse here. I am talking about "sales predictions" because I'm talking about the expected norm for sequels in the industry, which is in direct contravention of your argument. "Anecdote" is data that is not extremely meaningful (that is why I explicitly highlighted it as anecdote), but absent any other data a Bayesian can use to adjust their priors. More relevantly, Baldur's Gate sold about 2.2 million lifetime copies. Baldur's Gate 2 sold about 3.5 million copies. Baldur's Gate 2 is basically almost as much of a direct sequel as Deadfire was. About 1.3 million players had no problem jumping into a direct sequel (and who knows what the completion rate for BG even was back then, pre-achievements). Sales numbers are more closely guarded for modern games, but it seems that every successive entry in the main Mass Effect trilogy sold better than the previous entry.

Apparently you're unable to see the thrust of my argument and get caught up in irrelevant details, mistaking pedantry for insight. Completion rates likely do not predict anything about the success of a game or its sequel. You asked how people play successive games if they didn't complete prior games. I gave you anecdotal data where people (myself included) don't complete prior games but complete or jump into (yes, even direct) sequels (in another thread I mentioned mysefl not having played prior Mass Effects or Dragon Ages, but jumped into the third). This is the fundamental basis why sales expectations for sequels tend to be higher than prior games, because the mind share already exists. This is by all accounts the same assumption OBS was using for Deadfire going into Deadfire - they were expecting it to be a BG2-level hit (even then, BG2 wildly outsold BG), which colors some of the hugely expensive decisions they made (like full voice-over). I also provided empirical data of wildly successful games (and one more "successful" game) with low completion rates. edit - as mentioned many times, over and over, and even in backer beta updates, the fact that virtually all games have low completion rates (especially RPGs) is precisely why OBS designed their version of "new game+" the way they did [berath's blessings], where you don't actually have to beat the game to start unlocking its benefits. From a logical perspective, it's up to the person making the claim to provide the evidence anyway, so I await you sharing market research on how direct sequels and "non-direct" sequels are treated differently by consumers.

dude, with all due respect, between you and me, there's only one person actually trying to draw in actual evidence. go get hired as a product manager for obsidian if you're so confident.

we have to keep in mind that the sales drop explanation has to account for a massive amount. all these threads frequently hash out minute details that most people just plain wouldn't care about, at least to do the degree that it would predict possibly a 60% sales drop. the only really compelling theories i've heard - 1. gromnir summarizes it in another thread, basically the "deadfire not enough nostalgia/it wasn't BG2-enough" theory. 2. based on a casual survey of my own peer group (many of whom bought/backed poe1 but only one backed deadfire, and one more bought it much later) if i were to ask them their response would probably be "meh" which leads to the "market now saturated/already satisfied the demand" theory that has been put forth by paradox and possibly je sawyer. those are examples of games with extremely low completion rates that keep having huge sales. the difference between "sequel" and "direct sequel" is one that consumers probably wouldn't care about.

Aw man, this is all thoroughly hashed out in another concurrent thread. Anecdote - 1. I beat BG2 way before I ever finished BG. 2. I still have not beaten Fallout, but I have beaten Fallout 2 tons of times. 3. I know plenty of people who never finish RPGs like Fallout 3/4/NV, Oblivion, but always buy sequels. I would imagine any new player would just pick a random background. It's not even mentioned in many reviews, any hurdle here would not account for 600k+ in dropped sales.

ugh, ok, now i do have to rehash stuff mentioned elsewhere. very few people ever complete a game. this is true about any game. the completion rate may very, but even getting a majority of players to finish a game is a challenge and seems basically limited to linear, relatively short action games. Fallout 4, for example, has a 25.9% completion rate (this is just for the main quest). https://steamhunters.com/stats/377160/achievements "Prepared for the Future" Pathfinder: Kingmaker (which keeps getting brought up by comparison as more "successful") has only a 6% completion rate: https://steamcommunity.com/stats/640820/achievements "The Story's End" (though apparently this is understated due to how buggy P:K is) D:OS 2 (which also gets brought up as wildly more successful) has a 11% completion rate: https://steamcommunity.com/stats/435150/achievements "Sourcerer" edit - For reference, Deadfire has an 18% completion rate: https://steamcommunity.com/stats/560130/achievements ("The End of the Beginning") I don't think you can draw many (if any) conclusions about a game's critical or audience success from a completion rate. It probably just tells you a lot more about how accessible/long the main quest is. edit 2 - just to really pile on, completion rate is information that is trivially available to anyone, including--for example--product managers. If completion rate was predictive of future game success at all, and this was signaled by PoE1 completion rates, there's no way that Obsidian would've plowed ahead on a bigger-budget sequel.

There are some avellone die-hards out there. Definitely not 600k+ sales drop number of die-hards. Probably like hundreds, if that.

this is the only real compelling theory or sub-theory that i've seen hashed out in the forums, that basically goes like: "rpgamers are a more conservative bunch than you would think and resist major changes to the things they like" which is especially true for a nostalgia-fueled product. i don't think people always know what they want; or if they know what they want, know how to express it; or if they do know what they want or how to express it they don't want to come off as the uncool curmudgeon who "just wants another BG2." I agree with @Gromnir that there was a lot of nit-picking debate over mechanics and it was probably less about the specific mechanics and more about the broader "this isn't BG2" that wasn't being expressed well. it's a smart business insight from OBS to realize that you can't just lean on nostalgia (those people die off or move on) and you have to expand your audience somehow and modernize the game. It might also just be that there's no easy transition point to bridge nostalgia RTwP to modern RTwP and that's why Deadfire flopped. This would imply that for a PoE3 they would have to go all-in one direction or another: completely break with the past and push a "modern RTwP" as hard as they can (which may not exist and may require TB-mode), or go back and pick up on as many BG cues as they can (hopefully without regressing the mechanics). But I'm not sure either will get the same sales as PoE1 - PoE1 had the advantage of being first out of the gates for the latter, and I am increasingly skeptical about the size of the market for the former. edit - a constant confounding factor is Tyranny. Tyranny sold better than Deadfire (though according the publisher it still disappointed). It might have benefited from not even having the pretense of being like PoE or BG, so there was no "alienation" factor and could be treated as a thing in and of itself. The sales might have been lower than PoE1 but I think OBS would be happy for Tyranny-level sales for Deadfire (not to mention Deadfire likely had a bigger budget - Tyranny might have done even better if it received the same focus).

oh boy, there has been so much hashed about this already (in currently active threads even), so hopefully i will only say relatively new things. 2. This is opinion, also one I strongly disagree with. One of the biggest criticisms I have of PoE1 was how flat all the faction stuff was. It was literally like, do two quests for one faction and WHOOPS now you failed all the other factions. There was no feeling of impact or weight to those decisions. There was basically a thin central plot line (which admittedly I find more compelling than Deadfire) and everything else was pretty weak. 3. This is opinion, really, and can't explain a sales drop of like 600k+ 4. This is opinion, really, and can't explain a sales drop of like 600k+ 5. Difficulty was not amped up for PotD until well after the peak of sales for a game should have happened. While this is not opinion, it can't explain a sales drop of like 600k+, because it's not even relevant (the game was in fact criticized for being too easy on PotD). 6. Less of an opinion, but still can't explain a sales drop of like 600k+, because there's literally no perfectly balanced role playing system out there. I challenge anyone to argue otherwise. 7. This has nothing to do with Obsidian "not loving the game." Obsidian time is limited, and in any big RPG there are going to be tons of bugs to iron out. Dev time costs money, lots of it, easily 100k+ per person per year, probably 200k-ish considering benefits. It's a cost-benefit decision. If Deadfire sold like PoE1 i'm pretty sure we'd still be seeing ongoing support and even more mini-content. However, given the low sales, Obsidian can't sink the same kind of resources as they could in PoE1 (and frankly there are more game-breaking bugs in PoE1 at end of life than Deadfire anyway), it would be stealing money that could be spent for more successful projects (TOW) or new projects. While a lot of the original post was a lot of opinion, I think here you're just objectively wrong. Frankly, given how much new content they gave out (including fully-voiced mini-content, like the woedica book), I feel like all the support they gave helped them lose more money given the low initial sales. I think they persisted in spite of that because they love their game. If they didn't love their game, why did they make it? Obsidian is (was) a small indie dev studio with lower pay and worse job security than big corporate minders, love for their own style of RPG is (was) what drives (drove) them despite that.

found the article from feb 2019: https://www.pcgamer.com/obsidian-has-three-ish-teams-working-on-different-projects/ 'Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart had quite a bit to say in a new interview with Game Informer about The Outer Worlds, the Fallout-esque sci-fi RPG the studio is currently working on, and its recent acquisition by Microsoft. He also teased a couple of new things that the studio's "three-ish" development teams are working on, and hinted that even though The Outer Wilds doesn't have a release date yet, Obsidian already has its eyes on a sequel. "We have The Outer Worlds team, which is the majority of our development," Urquhart says in the video. "We saw the small group of people that are finishing up in Pillars of Eternity. And then we have two other teams that are starting things up."' i don't expect anything has changed re: pillars dev since then.

yeah, another article. it was from an article talking about the microsoft acquisition, which was nov 2018. it might even be a word-for-word requote, which is games "journalism" at its finest and really blurring the line of when it was talked about.

wow, did not know that. boy that gib-on-crit-death option is the biggest (only?) "not actually a purely cosmetic option" trap setting in the game. (personally i leave it on just for the extra challenge, but man what a way to confuse and/or screw over less-plugged-in players)

I'm not trying to pick on OP (everyone has different tolerances for difficulty), but I'm just really surprised by this sentiment. Possibly colored by some nostalgia? Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate 2 I remember being very challenging games at the age I picked them up (teens). And not always in a "fair way." In BG, it would be like "enemy gets a critical hit on someone not wearing a helmet and you get instagibbed" or "you fail a saving throw to avoid a hold person spell/effect." In BG2, it's those fricken mind flayers and liches. There were definitely fights that were both hard and "fair" (Dragons, in fact I remember the whole Windspear red dragon dungeon being an extremely challenging (but fun!) crawl, and the red dragon is so hard you don't even have to fight it), but there were just so much random instantaneous ways to die (edit - eegad, forgot about excessive level drain and mind control from vampires - even if i survive minsc beating on aerie, i still have to re-configure my spellbook after each fight post-restore). This has been litigated a lot on this forum in the past, so I don't want to re-open it. I'm just puzzled by this particular sentiment. I max out Deadfire difficulty. I do not touch the difficulty slider in BG2, or BG2EE even (I even used to leave it at the 2nd lowest notch, where you couldn't permadie and you always got max health per level). edit - BG gets a lot easier when you realize that Sleep is the most OP spell that has ever been created in any cRPG.

This is also a world where there is actually magic. In Deadire you go around telling people that a god has incarnated a gigantic statue and is trampling through the deadfire, and some people roll their eyes at you -- not necessarily that they don't believe you about seeing a gigantic animated statue, but rather that it's inhabited by a literal god. If there are people wandering around who can literally make fantastical things happen just by mumbling a few words and waving their hands, it seems like it would be even easier to be athiest. A miracle happened? No, wasn't divine intervention, was just Bob the level 1 Thaumaturge over there messing up a cantrip.

Yeah, I'm curious about this too. There have been complaints in the past about megabosses being too hard, but the standard reply was that "megabosses aren't intended to be something that everyone can beat." At level 20, there really isn't that much content for a party to tackle with much challenge, other than megabosses (and possibly FS Oracle or SSS Porokoa). DLC does significantly amp up the challenge significantly over base game. Frankly, I'm astonished that Beast of Winter has such a low "target" level in your journal because outside of min-maxed parties or exploitive cheese I think Ner and some of the content (Bridge Ablaze) is insane to tackle at that level (at least on PotD). edit - but still, even FS at level 20 isn't that bad.

I'm dubious that any beans were spilt. The quote from that article I've seen before, in an older context - I think they're referring to the skeleton dev team that Pillars had up until the "end of life" notice this past summer.

Thanks for that. Yeah, I tried that before posting, tried it again after you posted that. Eventually it worked. I dug around a bit more on my laptop (since info online is scarce) - it's definitely related to entitlements - trying to start up Deadfire kickstarts an os x process named 'tccd' (which appears to be related to handling privacy entitlements). It ate up an entire CPU core, and after literally 50+ gigabytes of data read, Deadfire finally launched (I had to leave Deadfire in a bouncing/hanging state the entire time instead of force-closing it). (While messing with it, Deadfire at one point requested some input keyboard permissions, but crashed my whole system before I could grant it. Even after granting it, I had to sit through tccd parsing 50+ GB of data. I vaguely suspect tccd was scanning all 55 GBs of Deadfire data for some privacy related reasons [I even was streaming the tccd logs, and data was definitely coming in for Deadfire and Steam related stuff], but not being an Apple engineer I couldn't say for sure what on earth was happening.) TL;DR: I suspect this is actually a macOS catalina-caused trash fire, not an obsidian one.

With the end of life note in May you said that no issue would be addressed that wasn't deemed "non-game breaking." Well this is pretty game breaking. macOS Catalina ends support for 32-bit apps. Consider me astonished that Deadfire was apparently a 32-bit app in this day and age. (This wasn't clear at all until after the upgrade, at which point it stopped working.) It's been known since like High Sierra that 32-bit support for OS X was ending. It seems irresponsible to release a product that was doomed to be unplayable shortly after it's end of support cycle. More to the point, Deadfire isn't even released on consoles yet, and it's already broken and unusable for current OS X users. Right now I'm setting up dual booting, but this should not be considered an acceptable requirement for a game that is not even fully released yet (see again: consoles).

IIRC, the "good choice" in PoE1 was one that resulted in her being (dis)honorably discharged from her order in the ending slides (and ostensibly joins the shieldbearers). The outcome in Deadfire where she is pretty normalsauce upon meeting you is one where you convince her to abandon her convictions and therefore she's still with her order. Remember this is an Obsidian game, so "morally good choices" does not necessarily mean "happy outcomes." edit - and with Pallegina's case, it's kind of murky what exactly the "morally good" choice was. Good for whom?

Imoen complains and will actually leave your party if you take too long, which is a nice way Bioware added extra urgency. Though Imoen will leave your party just to wait until the heat death of the universe in the Promenade by Irenicus (and how did she get past all those traps without setting them off?)

YESSSSSSS PLEASE GIVE US THIS. I want survival mode without having to reload every time Felix bites the dust.

The game seems to imply that stuff that goes into your inhaler have durations that are altered by the medicine skill. It might be the best way to make use of those extremely short Spacer's Choice 15s versions of consumables. Also, I unlocked some slots because putting consumable types into the spare inhaler slots amounted to my version of inventory management. Also in terms of "right consumable" the way I get a handle on it is that the only consumable I really care about the "right situation" are the +10 armor rating ones or -50% hostile effect duration ones, and I consider everything else as generalized combat buffs that improve me somehow. so I slot booze and/or cigarettes and/or food for general use and only pop open the inventory if I need the others.