After playing Kingmaker..

[thelee]

2 hours ago, Infinitron said:

It's not weird. What really matters is how much money each game earned, which is demonstrated by how well it did when it was new and being sold at full price. The concurrent players all-time peak tells the story:

PoE2: https://steamcharts.com/app/560130

Tyranny; https://steamcharts.com/app/362960

 

I can accept that what really matters is how much money each game earned, but nothing that follows after that statement makes sense or is evidence of that fact.

The fig disclosures actually do list actual money earned, not sales units. The sales units are estimated from the actual money earned (hence why a huge range for Deadfire). IIRC, tyranny still outearned deadfire (though perhaps the margin is closer than the sales numbers since Deadfire likely has a higher average sales price).

[the_dog_days]

Kingmaker was more successful due to its lower budget. I've seen no evidence that it actually sold as well as Deadfire.

[xzar_monty]

5 hours ago, the_dog_days said:

Kingmaker was more successful due to its lower budget. I've seen no evidence that it actually sold as well as Deadfire.

How do you define "more successful" here if you are uncertain that it sold as well as Deadfire, which bombed? However, according to Josh Sawyer, it sold better than Deadfire. That's not proof, but given that Sawyer has publicly made that claim, I suppose he knows what he's saying.

[Boeroer]

I think he meant financially successful - because Kingmaker's budget was smaller it didn't have to sell that many copies to break even and then make a profit.

I wonder if the backer rewards (copy of the game) count towards sales numbers?

[Infinitron]

I think it's likely that Pathfinder: Kingmaker has sold more copies than Deadfire, but not that much more. The two games had almost identical numbers of concurrent players on launch, but Kingmaker has clearly had a fatter tail.

Edited November 6, 2019 by Infinitron

[xzar_monty]

I personally find Deadfire's lack of success rather disheartening. It is a fine representative of my favorite genre, which in itself is extremely small: there's BG2, PoE, Deadfire and P:K. Boy I wish there were more high-quality games of this sort, but apparently not.

[Boeroer]

If you mean fantasy CRPGs then there's more. If you mean isometric, party based fantasy cRPGs then yes. That's pretty much it (if you don't like tha whole Avernum stuff).

[Ancelor]

In my honest opinion for POE3:

fix penetration

fix stacking

improve main story quality (BW for example was great)

improve companion quests and you're good to go

 

all else is pretty much fine for me.

[xzar_monty]

27 minutes ago, Boeroer said:

If you mean fantasy CRPGs then there's more. If you mean isometric, party based fantasy cRPGs then yes. That's pretty much it (if you don't like tha whole Avernum stuff).

Avernum looks a bit too rudimentary, so to speak. I have not played it. IWD suffers from ghastly AI and serious hack-n-sla****is -- I mean, the story is barebone and character interaction is fairly minimal. NWN had some promise, but the 3D view gets old in an instant, because the graphics start to repeat themselves; this made me realize that I really prefer individually drawn maps over any tilesets, no matter how fancy at first glance. I have tried a couple of others, like Temple of Elemental Evil, but none have come even close to those four I mentioned. I'd be happy to buy one such game a year, whereas in fact I have bought one every five years this millennium. But even that, of course, is a lot better than nothing.

[Gfted1]

Only ~13% of the players even finished PoE. So that probably hurt Deadfire wrt returning players / buyers.

[xzar_monty]

6 minutes ago, Gfted1 said:

Only ~13% of the players even finished PoE. So that probably hurt Deadfire wrt returning players / buyers.

Wow. That's a terrifyingly low number. And it would definitely indicate that the amount of players wanting to continue with the franchise was rather low. I wonder at what point this became obvious. I mean, clearly it took a while for the amount of players finishing the game to start to increase, but when did it (for all practical purposes) stop, I wonder if this is known.

Edited November 6, 2019 by xzar_monty

[xzar_monty]

Looking at those achievements, btw, I'm very surprised by the one called "The Storied Adventurer". I never even knew there were grand and legendary stronghold adventures. The best I got was major, most were either minor or average.

[Slotharingia]

4 minutes ago, xzar_monty said:

Wow. That's a terrifyingly low number. And it would definitely indicate that the amount of players wanting to continue with the franchise was rather low. I wonder at what point this became obvious. I mean, clearly it took a while for the amount of players finishing the game to start to increase, but when did it (for all practical purposes) stop, I wonder if this is known.

Well only 6.5% finished PK, on Steam at least.

[thelee]

18 minutes ago, Gfted1 said:

Only ~13% of the players even finished PoE. So that probably hurt Deadfire wrt returning players / buyers.

 

12 minutes ago, xzar_monty said:

Wow. That's a terrifyingly low number. And it would definitely indicate that the amount of players wanting to continue with the franchise was rather low. I wonder at what point this became obvious. I mean, clearly it took a while for the amount of players finishing the game to start to increase, but when did it (for all practical purposes) stop, I wonder if this is known.

This has been discussed elsewhere, but context is needed: very few players actually finish any game. 13% is actually probably pretty decent given how big the crit path in PoE1 is. (@Slotharinga also provides context from PK)

This is why Beraths Blessing exists the way it does because OBS didn't want to gate new game+ behind finishing the game, which very few people actually do.

Edited November 6, 2019 by thelee

[Gfted1]

Isnt the discussion about why Deadfire underperformed? Do players jump right into the second installment of a game having never played or finished the first?

[thelee]

7 minutes ago, Gfted1 said:

Isnt the discussion about why Deadfire underperformed? Do players jump right into the second installment of a game having never played or finished the first?

Probably one of the most common tropes about The Elder Scrolls games (and to a lesser extent the newer Fallouts) is that the main story quest is the worst part about them. I know plenty of friends and acquiantances who have never beaten those games (instead creating a character and futzing around for a while before stopping or rolling a new character); I myself have beaten Oblivion and Skyrim precisely once each just to see what it was like, and out of all my Fallout 4 replays I beat it exactly twice (when I was still motivated to hunt down achievements). I and all my peers still go back to successive sequels and do the same thing (except Fallout 76 which a lot of us saw an impending disaster).

Going back in time: I never beat BG until well after I beat BG2 multiple times. I never beat Fallout, but then played Fallout 2 to death. I still have never beaten Fallout, despite rolling characters for it several times and getting a fresh copy relatively recently.

So yes, people do that. It is anecdota, but if you want real data you should go trawling through the achievements of basically any other game (including AAA) and see how many people actually beat a game, even as the sequels do better and better.

Edited November 6, 2019 by thelee

[Gfted1]

Unfortunately, Deadfire achievements don't list completion percentage. Although if 18% hit level 20 that's probably a good minimum indication of completion.

[thelee]

3 minutes ago, Gfted1 said:

Unfortunately, Deadfire achievements don't list completion percentage. Although if 18% hit level 20 that's probably a good minimum indication of completion.

"The End of the Beginning" is the completion/final quest achievement. 18.8%
 

side note: Though the number for level 20 is coincidentally very similar, they are likely very different populations and not a good minimum bound. Back in 1.0, it was eminently possible to beat the game at level 12 or so (I did it at level 14) even on PotD. edit - frankly, before the DLCs came out it was actually kind of a slog to gather enough XP to get to level 20.

Edited November 6, 2019 by thelee

[Slotharingia]

29 minutes ago, Gfted1 said:

Isnt the discussion about why Deadfire underperformed? Do players jump right into the second installment of a game having never played or finished the first?

Aside from people not finishing games, lots of people play later instalments of games first. I've done it multiple times myself with Witcher, Dragon Age, Elder Scrolls and DOS. It's often easier to get into older games if you've played a newer one before and are invested in the lore.

[thelee]

Just now, Slotharingia said:

Aside from people not finishing games, lots of people play later instalments of games first. I've done it multiple times myself with Witcher, Dragon Age, Elder Scrolls and DOS. It's often easier to get into older games if you've played a newer one before and are invested in the lore.

oh yeah, i've done that with Mass Effect (jumped in on 3) and Dragon Age (jumped in on Inquisition). For me, the series had name recognition from their early games, so I was intrigued to play, but not intrigued enough to go back to the older games. So completion rate of earlier games was irrelevant, at least directly, and it also speaks to why OBS might have expected Deadfire to do even better than PoE1 (which is kind of a latent assumption based on their early Fig share projections).

[xzar_monty]

56 minutes ago, thelee said:

Going back in time: I never beat BG until well after I beat BG2 multiple times.

Same here. And, in fact, I only beat BG (just the once) simply to see what it was like to have a character go through the whole saga. I must say it was an unnecessary chore: BG is pretty much rubbish, as a game, if you ask me. It's just aimless walking on mostly empty maps with very little to recommend it.

[thelee]

5 minutes ago, xzar_monty said:

Same here. And, in fact, I only beat BG (just the once) simply to see what it was like to have a character go through the whole saga. I must say it was an unnecessary chore: BG is pretty much rubbish, as a game, if you ask me. It's just aimless walking on mostly empty maps with very little to recommend it.

BG becomes much better after you consult visual map walkthroughs so you figure out what the heck is the point of any given wilderness area, and also walkthroughs to help you sort through all the endless fetch quest dross.

It sounds like I'm being cheeky, but I'm not. I enjoy BG much more knowing what I'm actually doing in the game, versus me in the 90s first picking it up (there's a reason why I just stuck to Candlekeep and Nashkel and just kept doing restarts).

[xzar_monty]

But going through walkthroughs is so much against my ethos of playing these games in the first place. You do have a point, however, which in turn shows that there's something wrong with the way the game was made: much of the wilderness really feels meaningless if you don't know what to do. Also, the story in the game is all over the place, in my view.

But boy was BG2 good! Probably still is, as a matter of fact.

Edited November 6, 2019 by xzar_monty

[algroth]

1 hour ago, xzar_monty said:

Same here. And, in fact, I only beat BG (just the once) simply to see what it was like to have a character go through the whole saga. I must say it was an unnecessary chore: BG is pretty much rubbish, as a game, if you ask me. It's just aimless walking on mostly empty maps with very little to recommend it.

It does feel like it's the clunkiest and most poorly aged game of the lot, but it's not entirely without its charm either. I quite enjoy Noah Gervais' take on the game, and also think that's one of the very rare few games that also allow you to play just "some dude" who isn't some demigod by the end of the campaign. Some might feel the game seems less epic or more limited as a consequence but there is a very particular feel surrounding those early levels and adventures of the sort that are notably different to that of many other RPGs centering more around Chosen Ones and the likes (and yes, I know the protagonist is ultimately the Bhaalspawn, but it's not really a thing that comes into play until the very end of the game, and mostly sets you apart in the sequel instead).

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

As other have said completion of a game is relatively uncommon and not a good indication for long games like Deadfire, but the steam achievements reveal something more interesting where less than 2/3s of players made it off the starting island.  To compare this to PoE, less than half of players made it to the end of Act 1, which to be fair is significantly longer than getting off the island, and only 13% finished the game https://steamcommunity.com/stats/291650/achievements

EDIT: I forgot to take into account mods and console commands, as such the % of achievements only reflects Steam players who did that without using mods or the console and Steam players who used mods or console with some kind of work around like the IE mod for PoE.

Anyways I think we can draw a few general conclusions, that a significant amount of players will put in little to no time playing a game they have (whether purchased or gifted), that many will not complete the game and quit after a few hours, and that unintutive gameplay won't be pursued by most players (in these cases few relative pacifists or intentionally pissing off companions) Specific to PoE, Deadfire actually had a higher percentage of players finish the game, which we can interpret as either higher target audience approval or more dedicated players relative to owners of Deadfire or that Deadfire can be completed quicker than PoE. 

I don't think any of these facts or assumptions can readily explain why Deadfire under performed commercially, to compare it to a game that was wildly successful only 23.4% (at most, could be as low as 11.5%) players managed to complete DOS2 and only 60% got past the 1st act https://steamcommunity.com/stats/435150/achievements Josh's comments about Deadfire having less awareness remains the explanation I have the easiest accepting, albeit it is one that is more difficult to address.

And one last thing, Planescape Torment is the IE game that has aged the worst. It's a great interactive storybook but the gameplay is absolutely horrendous, and I can't justify replaying it like I could BG or IWD. Fite me irl.

Edited November 7, 2019 by KaineParker