Finally some sales evidence

[AwesomeOcelot]

BTW, there's a reddit thread where people have worked backwards from the fig dividends to guesstimate sales numbers. This would be reasonably accurate, as otherwise Fig would be committing SEC violations: https://www.reddit.com/r/projecteternity/comments/9uqx8w/first_dividend_recieve_for_poe2_fig_investing/

 

TL;DR: we're seeing about 125k-ish unit sales, excluding copies given out as part of backer rewards, which seems to mirror guesstimates from an accidental data leak from steam (and suggests gog is a very small proportion of sales). It took about five months for PoE1 to hit 500k copies (according to press release), and fig dividends are paid out at every six months. So Deadfire is very much underforming PoE1 by a significant degree. (The revenue picture to Obsidian might be better because revenue from DLCs don't contribute to fig dividends).

 

(apparently chris avellone has an axe to grind against management for Deadfire. arguably using a lesser-known property like fig to fund deadfire resulted in less free marketing, even if they were able to raise a decent amount of money)

If it was 125K sales that's about $5m from a game that's already funded. Obsidian don't see money from sales from their other games. $5m not including DLC which tends to be higher margin or the ports to the consoles. Deadfire was rapidly developed, with a small team.

 

I think the people in that thread took the break even total and divided it with the dividend given to get the just over 110K figure. I don't think that's how shares work, the dividend system that Fig out laid seemed a lot more complicated.

 

Without the long tail and deep discounts, I would be surprised if a game like Deadfire would get over 300K sales. There's a lot of competition in the market place, even from Obsidian with Tyranny.

[rheingold]

There were plenty of people on the forum and I’m sure many experienced gamers elsewhere who had concerns. I most certainly had major problems with the game from the beginning and I don’t claim any fortune telling abilities. It was abundantly clear that they were intent on throwing the baby out with the bath water and pretty much deleting all the hard work they did on POE. You just had to follow the blogs to be more than slightly concerned about the direction they were going. So much so, that I had no real enthusiasm for the game from the beginning. I think I backed it by less than a quarter of what I put in for the original. Not because I didn’t want a sequel but because I DID want one, and it was obvious that this was not going to be it.

It’s also the first Obs game I haven’t finished and have very little desire to.

Sad for me, because when they focus on their strengths not many companies can touch them. But the only part of the game so far that works for me is BOW and in particular the “burning bridge”. The rest I have no interest in, it’s just another open world sandbox type of game, and there are plenty of other devs who can do that, and in some cases better than Obs.

 

PS not blaming this entirely for the sales, just that my enthusiasm was considerably diminished with each update and I’m sure I’m not the only one.

Edited November 8, 2018 by rheingold

[thelee]

 

BTW, there's a reddit thread where people have worked backwards from the fig dividends to guesstimate sales numbers. This would be reasonably accurate, as otherwise Fig would be committing SEC violations: https://www.reddit.com/r/projecteternity/comments/9uqx8w/first_dividend_recieve_for_poe2_fig_investing/

 

TL;DR: we're seeing about 125k-ish unit sales, excluding copies given out as part of backer rewards, which seems to mirror guesstimates from an accidental data leak from steam (and suggests gog is a very small proportion of sales). It took about five months for PoE1 to hit 500k copies (according to press release), and fig dividends are paid out at every six months. So Deadfire is very much underforming PoE1 by a significant degree. (The revenue picture to Obsidian might be better because revenue from DLCs don't contribute to fig dividends).

 

(apparently chris avellone has an axe to grind against management for Deadfire. arguably using a lesser-known property like fig to fund deadfire resulted in less free marketing, even if they were able to raise a decent amount of money)

If it was 125K sales that's about $5m from a game that's already funded. Obsidian don't see money from sales from their other games. $5m not including DLC which tends to be higher margin or the ports to the consoles. Deadfire was rapidly developed, with a small team.

 

I think the people in that thread took the break even total and divided it with the dividend given to get the just over 110K figure. I don't think that's how shares work, the dividend system that Fig out laid seemed a lot more complicated.

 

Without the long tail and deep discounts, I would be surprised if a game like Deadfire would get over 300K sales. There's a lot of competition in the market place, even from Obsidian with Tyranny.

 

 

the sales calculations were a bit more complicated than that and took into account the fig dividend system. the revenue is essentially known, it's the number of copies sold that is the unknown.

 

from one of the posts: "If they sold the maximum number of shares, we'd each be getting $42.50 per share per million dollars of revenue until the investment amount is paid back." and they sold out the maximum number of fig shares so 192.67/42.5 => 4.5m revenue; depending on the unit sale prices you can get a range of sales, but people were assuming something close to ~$40 after some discounts and steam/gog's share of the cut. but definitely dividends implies 4.5m revenue, or else fig is committing financial fraud.

 

it's important to remember that the game was fully funded on Fig, but as I've repeatedly tried to remind everyone, half of that is in the form of these fig shares, which have to be paid back through these dividends. Which is different from the $4m that PoE1 got, which was basically pure up-front profit (after kickstarter's cut and assuming that the backer rewards were extremely cheap relative to the total funding).

 

Frankly I personally didn't expect Deadfire to do as well as PoE1 because it seems a lot of things lined up to make lightning strike for PoE1 (this was one among many, many, many, many reasons why i thought fig shares were a horrible idea for the average person), but even considering that this seems very low. Tyranny has sold only like 60k copies so far I think, so perhaps Obsidian was aware of the potentially extremely low ceiling for RTwP games, but maybe they thought the PoE IP would carry it ever higher.

 

It basically all boils down to what Obsidian was relying on for their own financial projections. For all we know this is all in line with their internal projections. But to me it honestly seems like a miss; on top of Chris Avellone's grousing 4.5m plus 2m in unconditional up-front funding sounds like a lot but programmer salaries + benefits and office rent in California don't come cheap and that money needs to cover not just Deadfire but the next project, too.

Edited November 8, 2018 by thelee

[bringingyouthefuture]

Lol - still CA again??  Such speculation ...

 

Well, since everyone is throwing in their 2 cents...

 

It's more the 2D unity environments that aren't attracting the next generation of gamers, I would argue, I don't mind it at all as I am really used to it, but I think new gamers feel like it is somewhat old and outdated - especially the loading screens.  All the most successful games recently that get mentioned Dragon Age, Witcher, DOS2, Dragon Quest XI - they all have a somewhat over the shoulder, third-person perspective (DOS2 is like a hybrid between isometric and the third Person over the shoulder).  New gamers want updated game engines - Unity feels old school.

 

I think Deadfire has some legs left on it, especially once all the bugs get fixed, and the final DLC comes out.  I think some of the major FPS and combat bugs, include the balancing issues early on hurt the sales definitely, plus expectations of people who wanted BG2, but instead got a great game that wasn't BG2.  In that vein you could also point that they stepped away from the D&D-base a little too much with all the changes to combat - I mean I find it interesting that Pathfinder potentially outsold POE2 even with worse reviews (I don't know for sure, but just looking at the number of comments people have left for the game is well past POE2 and it has only been out for 2 months), but it won't come close to DOS2, and again I blame the 2D static environments they will never be as popular as the more dynamic cameras of other games!!

Edited November 8, 2018 by bringingyouthefuture

[kanisatha]

I think the claim that people prefer TB over RTwP is not supported by any evidence. TB preferring people tend to be more vocal about and more insistent on their preference but that cannot count as representing more people. Also, a similar claim is that the D:OS games are very popular, and they are TB, so TB games are popular. Not so. The D:OS games are popular because they are co-op games, though it is also the case that co-op games by their nature have to be TB because RTwP co-op games, while possible, are complicated.

 

That's the bottom line for me for how I see things (even just within the RPG niche). Games have to be co-op/multiplayer to score big sales numbers. It sucks for me because I have no interest in co-op/multiplayer, but that is what a lot of today's gamers want.

[Zoraptor]

 

from one of the posts: "If they sold the maximum number of shares, we'd each be getting $42.50 per share per million dollars of revenue until the investment amount is paid back." and they sold out the maximum number of fig shares so 192.67/42.5 => 4.5m revenue; depending on the unit sale prices you can get a range of sales, but people were assuming something close to ~$40 after some discounts and steam/gog's share of the cut. but definitely dividends implies 4.5m revenue, or else fig is committing financial fraud.

 

 

Revenue ought to be calculated after the vendor's cut though*, not before, ie on nett revenue after Steam/ GOG's 30% is removed rather than the gross sales revenue. By my calculation that gives ~161k sales if price average is $40. That's also far more consistent with the steam achievements leaks data. Not wholly so of course, but then $40 per sale is high and any cut/ costs of the publisher etc would count against OEI revenue as well. Potentially even things like ongoing support costs could count against revenue as well depending on how the investor agreement is written.

 

*Steam/ GOG don't give OEI their gross sales throughput and then send a bill to get their 30% back from OEI; they pay OEI 70% of gross sales and keep their 30%. That 70% is Obsidian's revenue, not the full sale amount.

Edited November 8, 2018 by Zoraptor

[thelee]

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?

Edited November 8, 2018 by thelee

[thelee]

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.

Edited November 8, 2018 by thelee

[Zoraptor]

I think we can definitely say that there's 4.5m in gross revenue..

 

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.

[thelee]

 

I think we can definitely say that there's 4.5m in gross revenue..

 

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.

Edited November 8, 2018 by thelee

[Zoraptor]

Gross receipts ought to include the distributors' cuts though- for example the box office gross of a movie is gross receipts from movie theatres, not the studio's gross revenue, and GTAV or RDR2 selling x billion $ on release is gross receipts from xbox Live/ PSN, EB, Walmart etc rather than revenue to Rockstar/ 2k as well.
 
Having a quick look at the SEC filings and publisher/ distributor fees are definitely removed from the figure that the investors see, to whit:
 

Provided the Game is successfully developed and published, the Company will thereafter receive sales receipts from sales of the Game, net of any distributor’s fees, pursuant to the License Agreement, and will share those receipts as follows: (1) receipts will be allocated into a revenue share for DRIL and a revenue share for the Company, in the proportions specified in the License Agreement; (2) the Company will pay the holders of Fig Game Shares – Pillars of Eternity II a minimum of 85% of the Company’s allotment, in the form of dividends, subject to the Company’s dividend policy; and (3) the Board may in its discretion from time to time pay more than 85% of the Company’s allotment to the holders of Fig Game Shares – Pillars of Eternity II, if in its view business conditions permit it. Aggregate dividend amounts will be distributed equally among all holders of Fig Game Shares – Pillars of Eternity II, in proportion to the number of shares held. See “The Current Game, Developer and Shares”, “Our Dividend Policy” and “Description of Company Securities” in the Offering Circular.

So multiplying it by .7 is giving the distributor two cuts as the reported figures are minus fees (what I would call nett revenue, rather than gross). I certainly should use the same nomenclature as the filing in future to prevent confusion, I suspect there's a bit of a definition difference between NZ and the US there.

Edited November 9, 2018 by Zoraptor

[misterjimmy]

I like POE and I really hope POE3 could have better storyline. I don't mind they're still continue The Watcher's story But I think they should avoid some pseudo-philosophy thing like "what is a god ?".

[Ancelor]

Exactly. The factors that Ancelor pointed out are something that people cannot realistically know before they have experienced the game, which makes the argument a slightly dubious one.

 

This is one of the reasons why I'm inclined to think that the cause for Deadfire's poor sales lies in PoE1. After playing PoE1, they didn't feel the franchise was worthwhile, for whatever reason.

 

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

[Moriendor]

BTW, some strongly recommended reading (especially for those who just multiply number of (assumed) copies sold by $40 to $50 ).

 

Dude, Where's My Money? Part One: The Science of Steam

Dude, Where's My Money? Part Two: Divvying up the Loot

Edited November 9, 2018 by Moriendor

[draego]

Interesting quote from Josh

 

I would say that the original Pillars review numbers were higher than the game merited, but it's true that it's the highest-rated (on Metacritic) Obsidian game. The user reviews on MC aren't far behind. It was for that reason that much of my focus on Deadfire was on refining (or so I thought) things that were heavily criticized on the original game. The press reviews of Deadfire generally said that the sequel was an improvement on the original in most, if not every, way -- which isn't reflected in the final review scores, but that's a common problem that was exacerbated by the original Pillars reviewing a bit higher than it should have. The user scores are lower, but we've worked hard to try to address recurring / common complaints as quickly as possible.

 

I understand that these types of games aren't for everyone, but I still believe that the core gameplay is essentially the same in Deadfire and that we did improve on the original. Is the story worse than in the first one? I can understand the criticisms of it, but by whatever margin Deadfire's story or storytelling may be worse than Pillars, I don't think that margin is so great to explain a large difference in sales.

[dukeisaac]

I like POE and I really hope POE3 could have better storyline. I don't mind they're still continue The Watcher's story But I think they should avoid some pseudo-philosophy thing like "what is a god ?".

I agree with everything you say, except the part about the pseudo-philosophy. That is what made POE so memorable for me, a game that tackles (albeit only on the surface) metaphysical questions.

[Manveru123]

I like POE and I really hope POE3 could have better storyline. I don't mind they're still continue The Watcher's story But I think they should avoid some pseudo-philosophy thing like "what is a god ?".

Nah man, they just need to do it better. Have you ever played Xenogears? That game handled this topic extremely well.

[Gunnar.Maluf]

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.

 

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... 

[thelee]

 

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.

 

 

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.

[Boeroer]

They both made a bit over 4 million in their campaigns. PoE without investment shares though.

[esyvjrt]

But I think they should avoid some pseudo-philosophy thing like "what is a god ?".

 This. With a big emphasis on "pseudo". I really like the philosophic aspects, but if its really logic philosophy and not the kind of philosophy that are more emotional or some times even poetry with no logic meaning. I really disliked this also on Torment, i was doubting about whether i wanted to play it or do other things and the initial question "What does one life matter?" and especially the answers take away my desires of playing it.

[thelee]

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.

Edited November 9, 2018 by thelee

[Melusina]

 

Exactly. The factors that Ancelor pointed out are something that people cannot realistically know before they have experienced the game, which makes the argument a slightly dubious one.

 

This is one of the reasons why I'm inclined to think that the cause for Deadfire's poor sales lies in PoE1. After playing PoE1, they didn't feel the franchise was worthwhile, for whatever reason.

 

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.

Edited November 9, 2018 by Melusina

[thelee]

 

 

Exactly. The factors that Ancelor pointed out are something that people cannot realistically know before they have experienced the game, which makes the argument a slightly dubious one.

 

This is one of the reasons why I'm inclined to think that the cause for Deadfire's poor sales lies in PoE1. After playing PoE1, they didn't feel the franchise was worthwhile, for whatever reason.

 

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.

[Melusina]

 

 

 

Exactly. The factors that Ancelor pointed out are something that people cannot realistically know before they have experienced the game, which makes the argument a slightly dubious one.

 

This is one of the reasons why I'm inclined to think that the cause for Deadfire's poor sales lies in PoE1. After playing PoE1, they didn't feel the franchise was worthwhile, for whatever reason.

 

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.

 

 

I'm not saying POE is bad game. Just sucked too hard because it was burden to play, and was lackluster in story&xp. Let me put it this way: You eat at MacDonalds, from time to time. Food is tasteful, place is most clean & it has smooth xp. But bad publicity in food quality & underpaid staff don't make it very popular choice - at least not as it used to be.

 

We could say half of users hated POE, especially when hoping for BG3 and getting unpolished game & lackluster game.

Edited November 9, 2018 by Melusina