Jump to content

curryinahurry

Members
  • Posts

    629
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Reputation

320 Excellent

About curryinahurry

  • Rank
    (6) Magician
    (6) Magician

Profile Information

  • Location
    In Transit

Badges

  • Pillars of Eternity Backer Badge
  • Pillars of Eternity Kickstarter Badge
  • Deadfire Backer Badge
  • Deadfire Fig Backer

Recent Profile Visitors

1167 profile views
  1. Yes, but POE 2 cost a lot more than 4 million us dollars to make. They borrowed that money from the publisher. Thus my original point about paying back in a timely manner or not being able to get future investment for a similar game. In that case they would have to be able to produce a game solely by crowdfunding, which would be a much smaller game. Even smaller than the original POE, which likely cost at least double what the Kickstarter money they raised. The crowdfunding money is essentially the down payment for these games. If investors can't be enticed from the crowd-funding success, you're looking at much smaller games. All of this is moot however as Obsidian is now owned by Microsoft. Thus Boeroer's post about 2d rpg's on game pass. 2d or not, the idea of episodic content in Eora would be great.
  2. Let's say it takes a team of 15 people to design a game 3 years to complete that game at a budget of 4 mm dollars that a company raises via crowd funding. If that game sells enough units in the first 3 months of release to break even, then everything beyond that point is indeed gravy. But if it takes another 3 years for the game to break even, then you have the carrying costs of the 15 people who were employed to make the game, unless they were all fired after the game was released or moved to another game in development. That is likely at bigger firms like Obsidian but maybe not at smaller outfits which really need crowdfunding the most. Either way, slow returns on funding point to a not terribly popular concept that will likely, eventually collapse. You hypothesis probably works for firms that develop a niche in designing games at a much smaller scale (500k-1mm in crowdfunding) with a very loyal base.
  3. I'm sorry if it came across as I was trying to refute your post, I was not. I was just trying to explain the expectations of how Obsidian would have set expectations to both themselves and to Versus Evil, their publisher from whom they would have been fronted millions of dollars to complete the game. The 700k (plus or minus) baseline would have likely been disappointing, but would have been a break even for the money they borrowed, anything more would have been profit for both sides. I would seriously doubt that Obsidian expected an uptick in sales tantamount to D:OS 2; that game had loads of features built in to increase interest and longevity (co-op, pvp, modability). The 2d rpg concept was always going to be a niche, nostalgia based concept based on how they started it off. That is why Deadfire ran into trouble. No disagreement on any of your other points either, it's just that in a forum setting, as fans, we forget that this is a business. As to your other point, I'm wondering how being owned by Microsoft will affect scope of projects in the Eora sphere. I think they did a great job with world building and certainly Avowed attests to that, so more projects are likely. I'm just wondering how different a new party based game might be different from the 2d games we have now. I don't think Microsoft will care much about scope or scale if Avowed proves successful. Although smaller games like modules could be very cool.
  4. Not sure if you were around during the initial run (pre-development through early 2016) for POE, but within a few months of release, Paradox announced that the game had sold over 500k units and a few months after that, that they were past 700k. It's likely that Obsidian set their breakeven for a number like 700k for Deadfire, thinking that; worst case scenario, a 9 month period. In business, you set your budget on your expected results, so even something like full v.o. was likely a contingency early on. To this day, Deadfire hasn't sold much more than half of what POE1 has done (a bit more than 1.5mm units). No investor or publisher would back a deal that took 3 years plus to recoup. That is why there is almost no chance of a POE3 unless Avowed is a hit. And even then, it will likely be overhauled in terms of both mechanics and looks. Paradox stepped away from 2d isometric rpgs after Tyranny because they felt the nostalgia wave had been fed.
  5. Regardless of what Josh Sawyer might say about breaking even, I'm sure he and Obsidian ownership view Deadfire as a huge disappointment. Three years to recoup investment on a game who's predecessor was profitable after 3 months is ugly.
  6. I think it goes back to expectations. Tyranny was a new IP in a new setting. So the field for establishing the game's identity was fairly wide. Deadfire not only had expectations to carry forward form the first game, it also was carrying the nostalgia (to some extent) from the old Infinity Engine games. So POE having established the expectation, or Brand Identity for what a game in this series should be like, the next title had less wiggle room if it wanted to be considered a legitimate successor. And to clarify, I think that expectations fall into 2 buckets; one is in the feel of the game (this is where setting and tone matter the most), the other is learning curve related; how much time do you want to spend learning how to play the game in some optimal way so that it is not frustrating. In a game like Tyranny, the first is open and the second, at least psychologically for the player, is to be expected. In a game like Deadfire, both were largely established in the first game (at least for those who enjoy more standard fantasy settings) so changing the setting can be jarring and re-learning how to play effectively can be off-putting to anyone who enjoyed the first game.
  7. Sorry for the long post, read at your own peril: I’m going to offer a slightly different explanation than others as to why Deadfire didn’t perform well in sales. My explanation has nothing to do with the actual quality of either POE 1 or 2. Rather, it has to do with why people who purchased the first game (over 1.5 mm) were discouraged from buying the second (about half as many). When Obsidian announced POE on Kicksarter in2012, it’s pitch was for a nostalgic redo of the old Infinity Engine games updated with modern technology. This implied not just a D&D style system of combat and classes, but great writing, a familiar fantasy setting, isometric/ 2d graphics, and well developed NPC’s amongst other things. When the game was released, with the exception of a few loud dissenters, (who basically wanted a carbon copy of BG 2, The game was overwhelmingly well received. The game was not without it’s issues however, and Obsidian attempted to address many of them in the development of Deadfire. This is where I think the problems really began with POE 2. In attempting to address the varying complaints with the first game, the developers began making so many alterations to the mechanics, that the second game had a very different gameplay. Deadfire also had a very different setting (Age of Sail vs. Standard Fantasy, albeit more renaissance than medieval), very different implied tone, and the de-leveling of your protagonist all the way back to Level 1. For a game based, at least partly, on nostalgia, these changes were probably not received well, or at least with serious trepidation by the folks who shelled out money for POE. When the game came out and complaints arose about the game being ‘too easy’ and ‘not a challenge’, that probably only made the situation worse. I work in the design world, often with hotel companies and other entities that are very protective of their brands and the standards around how they want their products being shown to the consumer. In essence, Obsidian went off-brand with Deadfire. They tinkered so much with what they had established in the first game, that the second game resembled something so different, that much of their fan based decided to give it a pass. As I mentioned, not really about good or bad (although certain things like marketing, going to FIG, etc. probably didn’t help), just different.
  8. Valve is likely getting 30% from each sale on Steam. Then take out the publshers' cut, which could be another 30% or more. So the reall break even number on 600k sales is likely 12 - 15 mm us dollars.
  9. ^ Thanks for posting this. It's very informative and Josh Sawyer does a great job of laying out his thinking. It seems like the biggest problem, that manifests in different ways throughout his presentation is resource management. More precisely, how do you make changes to a game to improve on the previous version and account for the complexity vs time / cost constraints. It also seems like upper management made several decisions that impacted resources while not listening to warning from the development team. That's a recipe for disaster. I only recently finished POE and started playing Deadfire; about 30 hours in so far. It feels like a completely different game to POE. Not necessarily bad, but I can see how people got frustrated when this came out. Especially considering all of the early post release issues around difficulty, party mechanics, and ship management.
  10. Yeah, I've seen the posts about this and don't want to get into a silly argument,. I'm just pointing out that Dylan Holmes, the person who started this conjecture, specifically pointed out that he received a dividend payment of 192 dollars which translates, in his calculation to 110k in sales based on 580k breakeven, even though Steamspy has over 500k registered owners, Chris avellone re-posted this for his own reasons. The problem is that dividends are almost always payed only on profits. That is the structure of almost every investment agreement ever created. If you are correct and the game sold less than 200k, that would be a disastrous number, not just poor or disappointing sales. That would be about 15% of the sales of the original game. That's so bad that it would be hard to believe more than just the marketing director lost their job over this or that Obsidian would be purchased by Microsoft.
  11. Not sure how Fig investment agreements work, but I read a Reddit comment from the poster who posted this information. He mentioned it was a dividend payment from the initial investment. If that is the case, then in almost all cases, these types of payments are only made on profit . Usually one invests in something, they buy shares, so that is held in the investment until the owner sells the shares. Dividends are paid on profit earned by the shares to the investors. If that is the case, the sales number is closer of the sales to reach break-even + the additional sales. according to the post, that would be closer to 700k sales. Considering the Steam Spy sales numbers for this game are between 500k and 1 mm, the 700k total sales number seems more likely. But again, I don't know how the Fig investment returns are structure, so take it with a grain of salt.
  12. Thank you to the OP for the analysis; I haven't had much time to play the beta, but it seems my impressions line up with the analysis and what others are saying in this thread. Let me ask a corollary question to those reading and commenting on this thread that may have been asked already in some form: If we allow for greater granularity in the system by creating higher values for armor/ deflection, penetration etc.; does it make sense to go to a totally percentile system? One where all numbers denote a 1% change in determination? BTW, I am asking this question regardless of whether we stay with the POE 2 system or go back to POE1 (which is unlikely)
  13. This seems to be the simplest, most straightforward solution.
  14. To build on this comment, is the idea of determining where the 'sweet spot' in the level range should be (levels where the game is challenging and characters feel sufficiently powerful), and to simply ensure that a large portion of the game occurs in that range. If the game is going to take us up to level 20, then it might be the goal of the game design to make the sweet spot between levels 10 and 16. Thus levels 1 to 10 have a steeper power curve and levels 10+ it begins to flatten out a bit. That seems to be counter logical, but if abilities are now going to be more closely tied to time/ disruptibility, then the powerful feats/ spells can be tuned to that system. In doing this, the game can be designed so that critical path gamers can finish the game at level 12 and power-gamers/ completionists can finish at level 20, yet the end game scenarios remain relatively challenging for all.
  15. Fair enough. Those areas were a drag at times. Then again, perhaps a 15-level dungeon was destined to feel like a drag a some point. So you're suggesting that we only need trash mobs at lower levels? I could sort of get behind this, but then I could also see players complaining about later dungeons feeling "empty". Cheers More of a sliding scale; Lower levels could be 5 to 1 Trash to Set piece encounters Mid levels 3 to 1 Upper levels 2 to 1 One of the things that feels great in games like this is when you get to really unload everything in a single fight; and when that is necessary to get through the encounter. At upper levels, that type of encounter design lends to the feeling of characters being powerful. That is why trash mobs tend seem more tedious at end game; they just serve as an unnecessary distraction/ resource drain (that and wanting to get on with the story). I would rather have fewer, more complex fights; especially as the game gets towards its latter stages and the plot starts taking on more importance.
×
×
  • Create New...