Armchair theories on why POE2 didn't sell super well

[Gromnir]

29 minutes ago, rjshae said:

The fact that the game sold poorly out of the gate suggests people had already made up their minds before it was released. I think the fact that the early releases of PoE1 had negative feedback played a significant role in that -- the people who left then didn't return later. It also was billed as a direct sequel, so that tends to limit your audience: it implied you had to have played and enjoyed PoE1 in order to want to play PoE2.

The sequel formula worked for BG because of the timing; it didn't work here. Likewise, movie sequels rarely do as well as the original. I don't know what the answer is for PoE. Maybe they just need to leave it fallow for a while then return when the time is right?

given expectations, deadfire sold poorly. expectations were all wrong. 

the fig campaign were successful; brought in loads o' money. while the pledges were considerably fewer in number, dollar total were higher for deadfire than poe. whatever sales expectations obsidian had for deadfire, the fig campaign shoulda' clarified the situation. 

poe disappointed many purchasers. no surprise. particular given the manner in which obsidian were advertising poe, many purchasers wanted poe to be bg3 ultra, combining all the stuff people liked bestest from the ie games.

try and pinpoint what were the essential aspects o' bg2 and ie game success were elusive. nostalgia is emotional far more than rational, so trying to identify and balance essential features for everybody were a doomed proposition from the start. followers o' feedback for poe development no doubt observed how frequent the case people were not 'membering the ie games reality, but their recollections were illuminated and altered by the warm and highly personal nostalgia glow. even so, am suspecting obsidian did a pretty good job o' satisfying numerous poe purchasers. again, the robust fig pledges for deadfire revealed an enthusiastic core following, yes? 

obsidian failed to realize what they had and as such their expectations for deadfire sales were all wrong. invest more money to make deadfire were misguided. obsidian had built up considerable brand loyalty with a single game, but while fans o' poe were arguably more enthusiastic for deadfire than they were for poe, there were clear signs there would be fewer such fans. in spite o' such signs, obsidian indulged in extravagances such as full vo?

...

given the fanbase created by poe, am suspecting (am no expert) obsidian coulda' made financial successful poe games in perpetuity just so long expectations and development costs were reasonable. in fact, am suspecting deadfire "failure" did not hurt poe brand loyalty. no doubt obsidian could still make successful poe games in the future 'cause the people who liked poe by and large liked deadfire and would probable buy a poe3. however, expectations need be reasonable. try and sell microsoft on the idea o' poe3 challenging bg3 sales would be fanciful.

HA! Good Fun!

[thelee]

3 hours ago, Gromnir said:

obsidian failed to realize what they had and as such their expectations for deadfire sales were all wrong. invest more money to make deadfire were misguided. obsidian had built up considerable brand loyalty with a single game, but while fans o' poe were arguably more enthusiastic for deadfire than they were for poe, there were clear signs there would be fewer such fans. in spite o' such signs, obsidian indulged in extravagances such as full vo?

...

given the fanbase created by poe, am suspecting (am no expert) obsidian coulda' made financial successful poe games in perpetuity just so long expectations and development costs were reasonable. in fact, am suspecting deadfire "failure" did not hurt poe brand loyalty. no doubt obsidian could still make successful poe games in the future 'cause the people who liked poe by and large liked deadfire and would probable buy a poe3. however, expectations need be reasonable. try and sell microsoft on the idea o' poe3 challenging bg3 sales would be fanciful.

i think this is pretty good insight.

 

i mean, i thought the warning signs were there from the very beginning - because fig had fewer overall backers and half of them were fig shares backers. but i chalked it up to it being fig vs kickstarter. but i guess i was wrong there as well.

sorry to keep talking about disco elysium, but it's the recency effect. a game like that definitely shows that there is a market for extremely niche cRPG(though it is much more planescape than it is BG/IWD), and one that breaks a lot of traditions and molds in a more radical way than Deadfire sought to. And I am pretty sure that everyone is getting a nice payday out of it. But you have to be smart and purposeful about it. I'm pretty sure JE Sawyer rues the price paid for full VO and the ship to ship combat alot, and if we were to believe Avellone a lot of blame has to go to Feargus (who pushed for the fig, who also pushed for the ship-to-ship-combat, and also I believe also pushed for full VO).

 

So when are we gonna get Pillars of Eternity Tactics??

Edited January 9, 2020 by thelee

[Gromnir]

for a goodly number o' years we indulged in commercial and residential real estate ventures. there were a common hurdle we faced with sellers, a singularly common hurdle. price at which a person would wish to sell property were as much a matter o' what the seller needed as it were dependent on what the property were worth. property is worth $5 million, but seller needs $5.5 million. solution? well, obviously the seller should invest a couple hundred thousand in improvements and advertising and then wait for the right seller in order to get price needed, yes? after making additional investments o' time and money, the seller would become even more wedded to needed sell price.  such thinking is obvious idiotic, yes? 

*shrug*

perhaps feargus needed deadfire to make X dollars? easiest way to cut costs o' pretty much any business is to fire folks. especial when the people working for you is well known and/or friends, cost cutting will be a painful endeavour and non-heartless bosses will go to extreme and sometimes stoopid lengths to avoid the obvious firings.  

"if deadfire makes X dollars, then i don't need to fire bob and jane and steve and..."

am not making excuses for feargus. lord knows we wouldn't make excuses for feargus. am also having no idea what were feargus' actual thinkings regarding seeming curious development choices for deadfire. nevertheless, we has been in the situation where we needed X dollars to keep from firing bob and jane and steve. it is not an enviable position and am gonna admit we have gambled stoopid in the hope success would mean we wouldn't need make obvious needed labor cuts.  

turnover at even successful indie game developers is notorious common. being the boss at an indie game developer who genuine tries to keep good people employed for longer than the duration o' a single game development must needs be challenging.  am not saying feargus pushed for vo, and ship-to-ship combat, and whatever other bad moves you wanna catalog 'cause he needed deadfire to be successful. we don't know. is an example o' a mere possibility. nevertheless, when otherwise intelligent people make obvious blunders, there is often a reason for such mistakes. perhaps the reasoning were foolish, but rare is obvious blunders as simple as they first appear.

HA! Good Fun!

 

[Boeroer]

5 hours ago, Gromnir said:

given expectations, deadfire sold poorly. expectations were all wrong. 

the fig campaign were successful; brought in loads o' money. while the pledges were considerably fewer in number, dollar total were higher for deadfire than poe. whatever sales expectations obsidian had for deadfire, the fig campaign shoulda' clarified the situation. 

Sounds right. I guess they just assumed this was all due to fig being new and relatively unknown compared to Kickstarter. And then - as Josh said (can't find the quote) : preorders and sales right at release were even a tad better than PoE's - and that might even have cemented that assumption.

[Boeroer]

2 hours ago, thelee said:

So when are we gonna get Pillars of Eternity Tactics??

It's not PoE Tactics - but given that Josh loves Battle Brothers (I do so as well) and TB combat and classless systems - and that his PoE Tabletop Rules are rel. easy to adapt for such a game I'd say it's not totally unreasonable to hope for such a game. 

Battle Brothers was a big financial success for the developer (from Hamburg, Germany). Maybe a somewhat big studio developing somewhat niche games should focus on putting out more games but less costly ones (no fancy cutscenes, less full-fledged companions and factions, no Full VO etc.). After all it's the return on investment in percentages that counts. Also seems the risk is lower if you spread your game portfolio instead of putting it all into on big fat gun that sinks your own ship if it misfires...?

Edited January 9, 2020 by Boeroer

[kanisatha]

23 hours ago, omgFIREBALLS said:

In the least combative, most curious voice possible: What then is your explanation for Pillars 1 being more of a success, if they both had the same problem? Is it that people simply noticed in Pillars 1 that the complexity level was too high and didn't bother with 2 after that?

Yes. With PoE1 they bought it because of the nostalgia effect and the pitch that it was a successor to the IE games. They then hated the combat system, because whereas they could understand a D20 based system intuitively having played D&D for years, they just couldn't wrap their head around this new system that also happened to be rather complex. So they never bothered with PoE2.

[xzar_monty]

7 minutes ago, kanisatha said:

Yes. With PoE1 they bought it because of the nostalgia effect and the pitch that it was a successor to the IE games. They then hated the combat system, because whereas they could understand a D20 based system intuitively having played D&D for years, they just couldn't wrap their head around this new system that also happened to be rather complex. So they never bothered with PoE2.

Can you give an example of someone who felt this way? This is a possible scenario, but I haven't noticed this to be a thread. And as noted, PoE received rather good reviews.

For me, the new system was fine. And it's not complex.

[kanisatha]

22 hours ago, thelee said:

First off, in general, in most developed or developing countries, successive generations are more numerically literate than previous generations.

Second off, the kids are alright.

Third, doesn't explain why games like P:K do well. If anything, like I brought up in another thread, Deadfire is better than PoE1 here because so much more of the system is rationalized, there's less murk, there's a slower pace to combat, and encounters are less trashy and you have less party members to worry about. So this can't explain a massive sales drop.

 

I think if we want to go down this route, it's not the numeracy, but the fact that (as has been mentioned by some developer--possibly JE Sawyer) that RTSes aren't nearly as prevalent these days as back in the late 90s/early 2000s, so people just aren't used to the style of gameplay that RTwP is, and the context that it lives in makes less sense. But even here it doesn't explain a drop-off from a million+ sales, I think it only serves to explain why it's hard to grow your audience or find a new, less nostalgia-focused audience and therefore makes the case that RTwP is a niche genre now.

Sorry, disagree. First, not at all the point but ... at least in the US the numbers are very clear that an ever smaller percentage of people are extremely math/science literate while an ever larger percentage on the other side are totally incompetent. An extreme bimodal distribution.

Two, P:K did well because it uses the D20 system, which a good number of even casual RPG gamers are quite familiar with.

Three, RTwP has nothing to do with this issue. There are plenty of RT/RTwP games out there that are very successful. But in the tiny niche genre of old-school classic RPGs yes we're currently going through a phase where TB is the fad for many within that niche. But again even that only reinforces my point, because TB by its very nature is a simplification of the combat system. Developers are going TB precisely because more casual gamers find it *easier* to handle than RTwP.

[kanisatha]

5 minutes ago, xzar_monty said:

Can you give an example of someone who felt this way? This is a possible scenario, but I haven't noticed this to be a thread. And as noted, PoE received rather good reviews.

For me, the new system was fine. And it's not complex.

I do have several friends for whom things were this way, but I wasn't going to use that as my argument because that is clearly anecdotal. Btw, I also was/am fine with the PoE1/2 combat system, as are many on this forum obviously. But out there in the gaming real world, I am convinced views are quite different. And also again note, the D:OS combat system is so very simplistic and easy to figure out. This is indisputable in my view, and as such how can one ignore this when making comparisons of sales between the two games? For me it is glaringly obvious.

My personal model of this issue is as follows:

D20 combat system => Easy; PoE1/2 combat system => Hard

TB combat => Easy; RTwP combat => Hard

Classless system with limited character creation choices => Easy; Class-based system with many classes, subclasses, and multiclassing => Hard

Etc.

The more the game combines 'Easy' over 'Hard,' the more popular it will be.

[xzar_monty]

1 hour ago, kanisatha said:

But out there in the gaming real world, I am convinced views are quite different. And also again note, the D:OS combat system is so very simplistic and easy to figure out. This is indisputable in my view, and as such how can one ignore this when making comparisons of sales between the two games? For me it is glaringly obvious.

Convinced on what basis?

I'm not sure if anyone is ignoring what you pointed out, but the extent to which it matters is a different question altogether. It took me less than five minutes to note that D:OS did not interest me one bit. D:OS2 is a little bit better, but nowhere near PoE or Deadfire.

[Boeroer]

2 hours ago, kanisatha said:

This is indisputable in my view, and as such how can one ignore this when making comparisons of sales between the two games? For me it is glaringly obvious.

I don't want to repeat myself - but it seems that several people still don't consider the following (very basic) point that contradicts most of their arguments, including this one:

If the sales numbers dropped so harshly because a lot of players didn't like PoE or Deadfire for whatever reasons (be it overly complex mechanics - you name it) then the user reviews would reflect that.

Which. They. Do. Not. 

If anything then this is glaring obvious - and indisputable. I don't understand how such arguments can be repeated over and over again when this question hasn't been solved yet.

Nobody who came up with such a theory was able to explain this baffling conflict. Even if some of those arguments sound reasonable: this simple point seems to invalidate most of them. But maybe there is an explanation for this. I just can't think of one.

It would make some sense if players knew beforehand how the mechanics of Deadfire worked - like from playing PoE - and decided not to buy it then (hence no reviews from those players). But then why didn't they voice their dissapointment in the PoE reviews? 

Edited January 9, 2020 by Boeroer

[AwesomeOcelot]

2 hours ago, Boeroer said:

If the sales numbers dropped so harshly because a lot of players didn't like PoE or Deadfire for whatever reasons (be it overly complex mechanics - you name it) then the user reviews would reflect that.

I don't think that's necessarily true. I think some reasons get negative reviews, like bundling PoE into a more expensive package just before a sale, technical issues like incredibly long loading screens, frame dips, a game being too easy in the end game, are more likely to get negative reviews compared to a game being too complex. It's just hard to quantify this effect with any sort of confidence. If a games not for me, and it wasn't some sort of bait and switch, or didn't take a nose dive somewhere in the middle, then I'm not going to write a negative review on Steam.

[kanisatha]

What percentage of gamers write reviews? My guess would be an extremely small percentage. I've been playing video games since the late eighties and have never once written a review even though there many games I've played that I ended up disliking or even hating (D:OS1 for example). Furthermore, going by Steam reviews, a lot of reviews tend to be generic and superficial and nonspecific. I don't think player reviews can provide a good picture. Achievements also are not particularly useful because they won't capture the person who played the game a little bit, got exasperated, and walked away.

[kanisatha]

7 hours ago, xzar_monty said:

It took me less than five minutes to note that D:OS did not interest me one bit. D:OS2 is a little bit better, but nowhere near PoE or Deadfire.

And yet quite a number of other people out there somewhere apparently loved the game, right? That's exactly my point. You and I and others on this forum are not even in the tiniest bit a representative sample of gamers generally. So if we're not representative of the general gamer population, the things we liked/disliked about the game are also not going to be representative of that general population. That is why, instead of thinking about the things I personally liked/disliked about PoE, I am trying to think about factors that are more generic and thus likely to be factors affecting that general population. Yes I like everyone else here don't have any data of my own. But that's not preventing anyone else here from offering their opinions and speculations, which is the entirety of this discussion on all the multiple threads on this question in this forum. So why are my observations and speculations different and subject to a different standard? I am a scientist and I understand how inference works quite well.

[xzar_monty]

@kanisatha: They are not different, nor are they subject to a different standard.

You have now said both "But out there in the gaming real world, I am convinced views are quite different", and "Yes I like everyone else here don't have any data of my own". Surely you note the seeming contradiction? I asked you, "Convinced on what basis?", and I would still like an answer.

[Boeroer]

6 hours ago, kanisatha said:

What percentage of gamers write reviews? My guess would be an extremely small percentage. I've been playing video games since the late eighties and have never once written a review even though there many games I've played that I ended up disliking or even hating (D:OS1 for example). Furthermore, going by Steam reviews, a lot of reviews tend to be generic and superficial and nonspecific. I don't think player reviews can provide a good picture. Achievements also are not particularly useful because they won't capture the person who played the game a little bit, got exasperated, and walked away.

But you are arguing with anecdotal references. Usually, if a game is sold 1,000,000 times and 10,000 players write a review (see PoE on Steam) or simply somehow voice their opinion and judge a game (when it lands on Metacritic) and the professional critics come to the same conclusion by the way - then first of all it's a relevant sample size and secondly it would be extremely surprising if all the players who didn't review the game hated it while the ones who did review it mostly think it's good. Very unlikely. 

This is no solid proof. Reviews are more like a survey - and surveys can be misleading. But it has a lot more substance than just picking stuff one didn't like and then bloating it up to be "the" reason for the sales drop (as if one's taste determines what most people like or dislike) - while at the same time ridiculing the arguments of others.

I still saw no proper explanation for this (anecdotal reference is no proper explanation unless you reach a significant sample size -  finding like 10 friends who support your claim is not statistically significant). I read a lot of Twitter messages that praise PoE and Deadfire. This is because I follow some Obs devs and WorldOfEternity. I never read bad things. Obviously nobody who hates PoE would go to Twitter and post it into the timeline of an Obsidian dev (I mean nobody but weird ones). So this is anecdotal reference ("So many people on Twitter loved it!") but at the same time it's meaningless unless those voices would reach significant numbers.

 

Edited January 10, 2020 by Boeroer

[Boeroer]

6 hours ago, kanisatha said:

 That is why, instead of thinking about the things I personally liked/disliked about PoE, I am trying to think about factors that are more generic and thus likely to be factors affecting that general population. 

Exactly. That's why I listed the most likely reasons that line up with (or don't contradict) the data we have. Like bad marketing, setting, change of crowdfunding platforms etc.

I personally have 0 problems with the setting. It's just a theory that is a) reasonable and b) doesn't collide with the data we have (e.g. reviews). Because somebody who didn't buy Deadfire because they don't like pirate settings in RPGs would indeed not write a negative review. Same with bad marketing and so on: those are reasons not to buy a game and they wouldn't be reflected by reviews (since you didn't play the game in the first place).

Edited January 10, 2020 by Boeroer

[daven]

I read something about The Banner Saga 2 having disappointing sales compared to the first when they ad moved away from Kickstarter and went back to it for the third game. I think the marketing associated with Kickstarter must be quite significant. 

[Boeroer]

I also believe so. It's understandable that Feargus wanted to have Deadfire on his own crowdfunding platform (that only few people heard about before). I don't know how bad it hurt sales but I think it's reasonable to assume that it did hurt them.

[kanisatha]

8 hours ago, xzar_monty said:

@kanisatha: They are not different, nor are they subject to a different standard.

You have now said both "But out there in the gaming real world, I am convinced views are quite different", and "Yes I like everyone else here don't have any data of my own". Surely you note the seeming contradiction? I asked you, "Convinced on what basis?", and I would still like an answer.

On the basis of my personal intuition which is based on my more general observations of society as a social/behavioral scientist.

[kanisatha]

8 hours ago, Boeroer said:

Exactly. That's why I listed the most likely reasons that line up with (or don't contradict) the data we have. Like bad marketing, setting, change of crowdfunding platforms etc.

I personally have 0 problems with the setting. It's just a theory that is a) reasonable and b) doesn't collide with the data we have (e.g. reviews). Because somebody who didn't buy Deadfire because they don't like pirate settings in RPGs would indeed not write a negative review. Same with bad marketing and so on: those are reasons not to buy a game and they wouldn't be reflected by reviews (since you didn't play the game in the first place).

Ok, and my theory is the same. It is very reasonable, and it does not conflict with any known data. That's my point. Everything in this discussion is theory and conjecture. So why the piling on?

[kanisatha]

8 hours ago, Boeroer said:

while at the same time ridiculing the arguments of others.

Huh? Where did I do anything of the sort?

[thelee]

 

9 hours ago, Boeroer said:

while at the same time ridiculing the arguments of others.

38 minutes ago, kanisatha said:

Huh? Where did I do anything of the sort?

I'm going to go out on a limb and say when you sea-lion in and say "Sorry but I think you all are continuing to over-think and over-analyze this question." and keep making appeals to authority (repeatedly saying that you're a scientist) you're going to come off badly. I too also went to grad school in social science and live and breath data science as part of my day job in tech, but I'm not making underlining that fact in every other post except where it's actually relevant (e.g. using industry experience to explain why tool-tip-writing/internationalization can be extremely expensive).

 

42 minutes ago, kanisatha said:

Ok, and my theory is the same. It is very reasonable, and it does not conflict with any known data. That's my point. Everything in this discussion is theory and conjecture. So why the piling on?

It does conflict with known data, in several ways:

- it fails to account for the success of other numerically complex systems (not just P:K, but even Tyranny apparently did better than Deadfire)

- it fails to make any convincing argument about a massive drop-off in sales from PoE1 to Deadfire; we have plenty of theories that can explain smaller drop-offs, but not something that is closer to an order of magnitude

- despite your best efforts, it fails to account for Deadfire being a critical success in terms of both journalistic reviews as well as user reviews despite significant drop-off in sales

 

As a social/behavioral scientist, surely you understand the idea of a lit review, to make sure that your research and findings are part of an ongoing dialogue and not just a non-sequitur or spurious finding. Well, we've been at this for months, and we've exhaustively discussed even points like yours throughout. When people raise issues like setting, marketing, or nostalgia as topics, it's because those are the only ones that have continued to survive exhaustive critical scrutiny. What you're doing is basically barging in without having done the lit review, pointing out something that may be true but with at best a minute effect size, and being surprised that we're not all just automatically deferring to your expertise.

Edited January 10, 2020 by thelee

[kanisatha]

35 minutes ago, thelee said:

 

I'm going to go out on a limb and say when you sea-lion in and say "Sorry but I think you all are continuing to over-think and over-analyze this question." and keep making appeals to authority (repeatedly saying that you're a scientist) you're going to come off badly. I too also went to grad school in social science and live and breath data science as part of my day job in tech, but I'm not making underlining that fact in every other post except where it's actually relevant (e.g. using industry experience to explain why tool-tip-writing/internationalization can be extremely expensive).

 

It does conflict with known data, in several ways:

- it fails to account for the success of other numerically complex systems (not just P:K, but even Tyranny apparently did better than Deadfire)

- it fails to make any convincing argument about a massive drop-off in sales from PoE1 to Deadfire; we have plenty of theories that can explain smaller drop-offs, but not something that is closer to an order of magnitude

- despite your best efforts, it fails to account for Deadfire being a critical success in terms of both journalistic reviews as well as user reviews despite significant drop-off in sales

 

As a social/behavioral scientist, surely you understand the idea of a lit review, to make sure that your research and findings are part of an ongoing dialogue and not just a non-sequitur or spurious finding. Well, we've been at this for months, and we've exhaustively discussed even points like yours throughout. When people raise issues like setting, marketing, or nostalgia as topics, it's because those are the only ones that have continued to survive exhaustive critical scrutiny. What you're doing is basically barging in without having done the lit review, pointing out something that may be true but with at best a minute effect size, and being surprised that we're not all just automatically deferring to your expertise.

"Exhaustive critical scrutiny"? Yeah right. Basically your entire post boils down to: We who know what's what were having a wonderful discussion involving patting each other on the back about how incredible our insights are, and you who don't belong here barged into our discussion with an alternative view that we disagree with and reject. So we don't like you and you need to go away.

Whatever. I'm not interested in this any further.

The best thing Obsidian can do to make their next game popular is to completely disregard any and all "discussions" in this forum. It's no wonder Sawyer prefers to interact with every other forum except this one.

Edited January 10, 2020 by kanisatha

[thelee]

25 minutes ago, kanisatha said:

"Exhaustive critical scrutiny"? Yeah right. Basically your entire post boils down to: We who know what's what were having a wonderful discussion involving patting each other on the back about how incredible our insights are, and you who don't belong here barged into our discussion with an alternative view that we disagree with and reject. So we don't like you and you need to go away.

"I'm unable to make a coherent argument that addresses objectively-verifiable constraints on any theory/hypothesis, and am doing worse at this even compared to a forum poster who is literally perpetually in-character as an ogre mage, but it's clear it's everyone else's fault, not mine. I am a scientist, by the way."

 

25 minutes ago, kanisatha said:

Whatever. I'm not interested in this any further.

bye_felicia.gif

Edited January 10, 2020 by thelee