Armchair theories on why POE2 didn't sell super well

[thelee]

25 minutes ago, kanisatha said:

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.

by the by, some of the constraints we raise, were raised by sawyer himself in a now-ancient tumblr post. Basically, accounting for

a) positive critical and user reception

b) unprecedentedly huge drop-off in sales

c) higher sales for similar projects

Sawyer also has more access to internal marketing and sales data than we do along with receiving more direct feedback than us just navel-gazing in forums, e.g. (with emphasis added)

https://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/189033278221/why-blame-the-relative-failure-of-poe2-on-already

"However disappointed people were with the story of Deadfire, I don’t think they were so disappointed, collectively, that it contributed to an enormous loss in sales[1].  Also, I think most of the disappointment was with how the story developed, not with the basic premise (at least, this is what feedback generally indicates)."

[1] is a recurring theme that any hypothesis has to address. non-self-proclaimed scientists have made the case better way before you that a bunch of small things could collectively lead to a massive drop-off in sales, but it's a pretty brittle hypothesis.

of course, the catalyst for a lot of this: https://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/188915786456/will-there-be-a-pillars-3-that-is-not-something

 

Edited January 10, 2020 by thelee

[Boeroer]

1 hour ago, kanisatha said:

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

Science doesn't use anecdotal reference or personal intuition as its base. It's exactly the opposite of what science should do.

1 hour ago, kanisatha said:

[ridiculing arguments] - Huh? Where did I do anything of the sort?

 I didn't mean you but the post from Bleak who said that the "pirate setting" theory was amusing. That got mixed up a bit while trying to address several posts about the "players didn't like the implementation of X" theories.

[xzar_monty]

2 hours ago, kanisatha said:

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

Fair enough. So there's no data whatsoever. You can be convinced about something on the basis of your intuition, and I'm not going to dismiss that, but surely you must realise that it's not going to look convincing to anybody else.

It doesn't really do you any good to get upset in the way you do. As for the patting each other on the back: who's doing that, and to whom? I personally haven't experieced any of it. Recently, the most active participants in this discussion have been the four of us, if I remember correctly, so that's Boeroer, thelee, you and me. I know nothing about any of you and have no reason to either favor or disfavor you.

[Boeroer]

1 hour ago, kanisatha said:

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.

You mean because we won't follow your line of argumentation but keep challenging it with... reason?
Sounds a bit like

 

You can ask Gromnir why Josh left the forums. I can assure you our civil style of discussion was not the case. I'm pretty sure Josh could easily handle the forum in its current form. His departure had other reasons than simply not agreeing.

 

Edited January 10, 2020 by Boeroer

[daven]

Was it Sensuki?

[Boeroer]

I wasn't there (only joined after the release of PoE) and thus I didn't witness what was going on first-hand during beta and pre-release.

Afaik Sensuki was very outspoken about stuff he didn't like in the beta. But I can't say if he was a source of toxicity or not. 

Gromnir once spoke about that time but I can't find his post anymore.

 

Edited January 11, 2020 by Boeroer

[Clawdius_Talonious]

Back to armchair tneories about Deadfire sales, I really think that the Isometric text heavy RPG shoots itself in the foot because it looks good and plays the same for decades. Planescape Torment still looks alright and plays well, modded to support widescreen resolutions. Because of the fact that the play experience is static, if there is no potential for a major twist that could be spoiled, you can wait for the games to go on sale cheap and not miss much.

In fact, you get a more polished and often expanded experience for less money. Between Steam sales and the like, games culture pushes people away from a sense of release day urgency and toward a more leisurely games acquisition path. Games that are text heavy need to generate serious buzz or spoiler heavy conversations that people want to participate in without spoiling the twists for themselves. If a game like this generates positive reviews but not a ton of spoiler talk, it needs to be a new property or generate interest through other means in order to move a lot of copies at a high price.

There's also the fact that Pillars was a kind of divisive game, a bunch of people bounced right off of the game after 10 or fewer hours play. The fact is that because of the epic length and start of a series plans for Pillars it didn't have the best onboarding. People often puttered around Gilded Vale and got bored before even making it to Defiance Bay. In addition to the normal fatigue, NPCs that served as massive text dumps without any real connection to the lore or backstory introduced a new twist where nothing tells you directly "These flashbacks won't tie into any plot, any world building you need to know, any quest or anything important" and a lot of people seemed to read more of them than they probably should have. By exhausting themselves reading these self contained stories that don't matter, they had less energy to expend reading things that did matter.

I put my nephew in front of Planescape Torment's into and he skipped all the text and said it was boring. He was 17 at the time, just a few years ago. I told him that ofc it was he just skipped past the first chapter of a book and said it was boring. Pillars 1 added a new wrinkle, interspersed with the interesting stuff there were weird asides. Sure, the text color and name color is a dead giveaway that they're different but because the players are often skimming instead of really reading everything like they should a lot of people didn't see that they should basically pretend those characters don't exist. If they hadn't come into the game until Defiance Bay it might have kept more people interested longer.

I can't really definitively say which of these points even mattered the most to the people I do know who bounced right off of Pillars 1, Deadfire doesn't have any of those problems, but at the same time people who see 9/10 on Pillars and bounced right off aren't going to pay full price or 66% or whatever for Deadfire. People can't really tell you in a word why they didn't get into a game. In order to avoid conversations about it they're more likely to give a blithe "it was alright" and not say "I played for four hours hadn't gotten very far and never fired it up again, getting further and further away from it I felt like I'd need to restart and waste another few hours getting back to where I bounced off so I never bothered to fire it up again."

Pillars initial success may have actually worked against it, taking people who were of middling interest and convincing them that Pillars was too old school or too *whatever* for them. For them, they see all the rave reviews and think "It's not them, it's me" and don't see across the board improvements in Deadfire as a reason to pick it up. It's like e.g. Sushi, they think it wasn't for them and the people who love it are just loud about it. They don't interject why they didn't care for it, they just don't spend money on it.

[xzar_monty]

Speaking of isometric RPGs and their sales: Disco Elysium is winning awards, but do we and/or can we know how it's doing commercially? It's a lovely, lovely game. Very well written. Deserves to do well. It's a lot better written than Deadfire, and an awful lot better written than P:K.

[daven]

There is an audience for these types of games, the budget/expectations were too high. The Shadowrun games had 0 voice acting and were perfectly fine. They focused too much on things which didn't really matter... v/o and the ship minigame. Didn't Josh say the Ship game was a black hole of resources? And it's the most universally disliked part of the game.  Should have been scrapped... i like that Josh basically said 'I was told we had to put it in even though I said it was a bad idea'. Very honest of him.

[kanisatha]

23 hours ago, Boeroer said:

Science doesn't use anecdotal reference or personal intuition as its base. It's exactly the opposite of what science should do.

But where's the science? I don't see any science anywhere in this thread. You are being dismissive of my posts because they are my personal opinions even while yourself only offering personal opinions too but somehow spinning your personal opinions as "science" and "reason." This entire thread is nothing but personal opinions and unsubstantiated theories, and your personal opinions and theories are no better than mine.

[kanisatha]

23 hours ago, xzar_monty said:

Fair enough. So there's no data whatsoever. You can be convinced about something on the basis of your intuition, and I'm not going to dismiss that, but surely you must realise that it's not going to look convincing to anybody else.

It doesn't really do you any good to get upset in the way you do. As for the patting each other on the back: who's doing that, and to whom? I personally haven't experieced any of it. Recently, the most active participants in this discussion have been the four of us, if I remember correctly, so that's Boeroer, thelee, you and me. I know nothing about any of you and have no reason to either favor or disfavor you.

Ok. This is a fair-minded take and one I can accept, so long as we agree this works both ways, which is to say I also am not convinced by the personal opinions of certain others.

[daven]

4 minutes ago, kanisatha said:

But where's the science? I don't see any science anywhere in this thread. You are being dismissive of my posts because they are my personal opinions even while yourself only offering personal opinions too but somehow spinning your personal opinions as "science" and "reason." This entire thread is nothing but personal opinions and unsubstantiated theories, and your personal opinions and theories are no better than mine.

I'll give you some science.

 

Chicken leads to egg, egg leads to omlette, omlette leads toe fecal urgency.

[kanisatha]

1 hour ago, Clawdius_Talonious said:

Pillars initial success may have actually worked against it, taking people who were of middling interest and convincing them that Pillars was too old school or too *whatever* for them. For them, they see all the rave reviews and think "It's not them, it's me" and don't see across the board improvements in Deadfire as a reason to pick it up. It's like e.g. Sushi, they think it wasn't for them and the people who love it are just loud about it. They don't interject why they didn't care for it, they just don't spend money on it.

This resonates with me. I think you have something here that makes sense (to me).

[kanisatha]

39 minutes ago, xzar_monty said:

Speaking of isometric RPGs and their sales: Disco Elysium is winning awards, but do we and/or can we know how it's doing commercially? It's a lovely, lovely game. Very well written. Deserves to do well. It's a lot better written than Deadfire, and an awful lot better written than P:K.

There was a news article late last year interviewing the devs and they said the game had made enough money for it to have been sufficiently profitable for them (relative to their budget I would guess). I tried Googling the article but cannot seem to find it now.

[Boeroer]

19 minutes ago, kanisatha said:

But where's the science? I don't see any science anywhere in this thread. You are being dismissive of my posts because they are my personal opinions even while yourself only offering personal opinions too but somehow spinning your personal opinions as "science" and "reason." This entire thread is nothing but personal opinions and unsubstantiated theories, and your personal opinions and theories are no better than mine.

There is no science in this thread. I mean besides the "scientist" card you waved around in a rather self-contradictory way in order to answer xar's question .

But there are some numbers, facts and insights from the devs (who have access to telemetry) we can use. And some of them clash with what you and Bleak deem to be the main cause for the massive sales drop of Deadfire compared to PoE.

What clashes are for example critics' and users' reviews. Doesn't mean your take is completely wrong, but those discrepancies make your theories very unlikely to be the main reason of a massive sales drop. In my opinion they played a minor part. But that's just my guess. I can't say how big the part is. I'm just quite sure that they can't play a major role since that would mean we would see that in users' and critics' reviews.

I didn't claim my or several other theories are the definite answer. I only said that they don't clash as hard with the numbers/facts/statements. For example the "marketing failure" (here I include the move from Kickstarter to Fig). Or the theory that the setting put potential players off. 

Those are also only educated guesses - but they align with what we know. Those aren't even my theories. The only thing I brought up was that maybe the setting put players off and others chimed in. The rest is a collection of theories that were brought up and deemed reasonable when we look at the data at hand. And therefore, yes: they are not entirely unsubstantiated and "better" (in the sense that they seem to be more likely) than others which clash with the data. Are they true? We will most likely never now.

Still it is reasonable to point logical errors out and it is reasonable to question your theories if they don't take known data into account. Unless you can't give a plausible explanation how this clash can get resolved then I'll continue to question your take. You may not like it and get frustrated or even angry, but it's reasonable. It's not "my theory vs. your theory". It's me seeing a flaw in your argumentation and pointing it out. Did the same with xar - he took it better I must say. If you point out an error of mine then that's fine as well. It's a discussion after all and that's what these forums are for.

I'm the last person to not say "good point" once you make one. But so far you didn't. That doesn't mean that those cases you described aren't there. I just question that those lead to such a massive sales drop while players who actually played the game obviously liked it (on average). 

Another theory that runs into the exact same problem: "It's the bugs". Because they are indeed annoying. Would make sense if user critics would reflect that. But same rebuttal: There were complaints about bugs - but reviews don't hint that it was a major problem for most players. Obsidian has a reputation for buggy games: hasn't hurt PoE or Outer World sales.

---

Disco Elysium: if we want to take the number of reviews on Steam and try to guess sales numbers then we can see that it has about the same amount of reviews as Deadfire iirc (or was it PoE? correct me if I'm wrong) then I guess we could deduce that it sold about as many copies? Not reliable of course, more of a hint. At the same time I believe its budget was a lot smaller than Deadfire's so it should have been a financial success. After all Josh said that Deadfire was a disappointment when it comes to sales, but was doing "ok" financially. Don't know how that statement fits into the whole "fig investment" disaster though.

Deadfire would have been a financial success if Ship Combat and Full VO hadn't been included. Also what Gromnir said seems to be true: expectations were way too high. Mostly due to the success of D:OS --> D:OS2 as Josh said.

Note that Larian didn't switch crowdfunding platforms...

 

 

[Boeroer]

2 hours ago, Clawdius_Talonious said:

Pillars initial success may have actually worked against it, taking people who were of middling interest and convincing them that Pillars was too old school or too *whatever* for them. For them, they see all the rave reviews and think "It's not them, it's me" and don't see across the board improvements in Deadfire as a reason to pick it up. It's like e.g. Sushi, they think it wasn't for them and the people who love it are just loud about it. They don't interject why they didn't care for it, they just don't spend money on it.

This is a theory I can get behind. Don't know if it plays a major role but at least it explains nicely why players may have dropped PoE and didn't buy Deadfire without having an impact on its score. 

On the other hand: isometric RPGs occupy a narrow niche in today's gaming market. I would argue that the majority of players who bought PoE knew what to expect (I mean lots of text and all that "boring" stuff that's usually in those games). After all even PoE is nowhere near even low-selling AAA titles. So in order to let the sequel drop as hard as Deadfire dropped there has to be something more it seems...?

Also only anecdotal, but I read about several players (who played PoE and found it good but were no hardcore fans) who completely missed that Deadfire was even happening. 

 

[kanisatha]

22 minutes ago, Boeroer said:

Still it is reasonable to point logical errors out and it is reasonable to question your theories if they don't take known data into account. Unless you can't give a plausible explanation how this clash can get resolved then I'll continue to question your take. You may not like it and get frustrated or even angry, but it's reasonable. It's not "my theory vs. your theory". It's me seeing a flaw in your argumentation and pointing it out. Did the same with xar - he took it better I must say. If you point out an error of mine then that's fine as well. It's a discussion after all and that's what these forums are for.

I did point out a flaw in your argument, a very fundamental flaw at that. Your entire argument, including your rationale for playing down my theory, is based on considering user reviews (as you put it). But user reviews completely miss two very major segments of the overall population: (1) those people who did not buy the game and never had any intention of buying the game, and (2) those people who bought the game, did not like it, but were not sufficiently motivated to write a review. I would estimate these two groups make up the overwhelming majority of the population. As such, user reviews are not only a non-representative sample of the population, they are a biased sample. So, for me, user reviews are not "known data." They are not data at all. Thus, when you use user reviews as your rationale for any argument that you make, for me that argument is completely unreasonable. I would not accept any inference drawn from user reviews (or even critics' reviews for that matter) as being reasonable/logical/factual.

[xzar_monty]

1 hour ago, kanisatha said:

I would not accept any inference drawn from user reviews (or even critics' reviews for that matter) as being reasonable/logical/factual.

You know, this would be a perfectly reasonable approach and one that I would applaud, if only you did not, at the same time, make very strongly-worded arguments based on what you call your "intuition" and which you yourself admit have no data whatsoever to back them up. So you're playing game of contradiction here, or trying to play with two sets of cards at the same time (however you want to put it), and you've been strangely unwilling to own up to it -- while at the same time reacting to others with blatant and unfounded arrogance. So you don't look good in this, if I may be so bold as to point it out to you.

It is entirely possible that other people have a scientific background as well. Perhaps they even work at important scientific institutions and so forth. But they don't feel that waving that card does anybody any favors.

Edited January 11, 2020 by xzar_monty

[Boeroer]

2 hours ago, kanisatha said:

I did point out a flaw in your argument, a very fundamental flaw at that. Your entire argument, including your rationale for playing down my theory, is based on considering user reviews (as you put it). But user reviews completely miss two very major segments of the overall population: (1) those people who did not buy the game and never had any intention of buying the game, and (2) those people who bought the game, did not like it, but were not sufficiently motivated to write a review.

You are missing that we have two games here, the second being a sequel to the first one. If we only had one game and its reviews then your point would be more viable. But we have a first game which sold well and did get good reviews from users and critics alike - which weakens the argument that a lot of players didn't like certain aspects of the game and therefore didn't buy the second. And then we have the second game which score is equally good but sold less than half. 

So no matter how you look at it: it is unlikely (not impossible) that the massive sales drop stems from the things you listed alone. 

And of course user reviews are known data. As are surveys. They are very similar. Tell your favorite polling agency that they were working with non-data all the time...

In this case we even have significant sample sizes (around 10,000 reviews on Steam alone). Of course it doesn't need to be a representative sample of the population[sic] but a representative sample of PoE- or Deadfire players. If Pillars had sold 1,000,000 Steam copies then 10,000 Steam reviews is def. a representative sample size.

And while a survey may not be 100% accurate most of times it can give a good approximation. Reviews don't prove any theory, but they are indications and make some theories less likely than others. That's what I'm pointing out again and again and that's what you refuse to acknowledge for whatever reason. 

Besides reviews we also had the Obsidian Backer survey they did after PoE, telemetry from Deadfire, post mortem talk of Josh Sawyer, a fired* marketing person at Obsidian and other pieces of information that nearly all do not align with your theory. Reviews was just one data point but I think it is the most obvious one and it's easy to verify.

*wasn't actually fired but his contract was based on success of the marketing campaign. He had to go so it is safe to assume that the marketing goals were not achieved.

Edited January 11, 2020 by Boeroer

[thelee]

3 hours ago, kanisatha said:

(1) those people who did not buy the game and never had any intention of buying the game, and (2) those people who bought the game, did not like it, but were not sufficiently motivated to write a review. I would estimate these two groups make up the overwhelming majority of the population. As such, user reviews are not only a non-representative sample of the population, they are a biased sample. So, for me, user reviews are not "known data." They are not data at all.

i'm honestly perplexed by this being the attitude of a self-described social/behavioral scientist. even biased or non-representative samples are useful if you know what the bias is, because you can adjust them with weights. this is what happens all the time with political polling or survey analysis because good luck getting a perfectly representative response rate. 

with (2) you would have to have a hypothesis that the nonresponse rate for people who did not like the game were different from the nonresponse rate for people who did like the game - and i mean the spectrum of weak to strong feelings; you may argue that people who are weakly negative on a game may be less motivated to write a review, but i don't see why this would be a different phenomenon from people who are weakly positive. frankly, i would be more concerned about user reviews not being representative if they diverged in any significant way from critical reviews, which they don't. hence why a lot of the recurring theories (and je sawyer's own statements to this effect) revolve around the assumption that people who did play deadfire generally really liked it, and so the issue is not really about what's wrong with deadfire per se and more about what would cause the audience to shrink so much (essentially a glorified funnel analysis from PoE1). Hence - things like setting, poor marketing, higher competition, satisfied nostalgia demand, etc. Many of us are trying to answer #1, and you seem to be trying to answer some variation of #2 and trying to rationalize it with a lot of other scaffolding which is honestly rather unconvincing. The theories that keep persisting are the ones that generally require us to do less discounting/rationalization of what data we do have.

I mean, for example, P:K has way more mediocre reviews than Deadfire, but sold way better apparently.

[Boeroer]

Thank you for translating my thoughts into better English than my German brain ever could.

---

So back to the armchair.

Another hint for thelee's #1:

Pathfinder: Kingmaker was funded with Kickstarter. D:OS I and II were funded with Kickstarter as well. As was PoE. Keeping in mind that they are targeting a rel. small audience all sold well enough regardless of critics (in a certain spectrum) it seems. 

Deadfire was funded with Fig. 

This is no proof but it seems that Kickstarter has quite some impact on the publicity. Like daven already said. 

I think you need to reach that niche audience, reach those RPG players - as many as possible - in order to sell a lot of copies of an isometric, text-heavy cRPG.

Add to this the assumption that some of the cRPG crowds who cherish Baldur's Gate etc. might be a tad conservative with their settings and might not be too hyped for a Caribbean pirate themed Pillars game - also because the first one already wasn't too much like Baldur's Gate despite the "spiritual successor" tag. We got the grog pet for a reason.

Then add the situation where there suddenly was a lot more competition in that niche market.

Then this conglomeration would be a plausible theory for a significant sales drop. No evidence, still educated guessing. The other stuff comes on top.

Also maybe applicable to Tyranny? Expectations too high, no Kickstarter, different marketing strategy and setting ("this time you're evil in the kinda bronze age, hohoho") more competition...

However, if this was true it would be kind of bad? Smaller RPG studios would be trapped into using Kickstarter (if they didn't have a potent publisher who can put up a big marketing campaign), use the old settings if they wanted to maximize sales...

Druidstone did none of that and didn't do too well either (despite having some publicity as creators of Legend of Grimrock I & Ii).

And then we have Disco Elysium which did none of that. Although I think in this case the game profited immensely from its uniqueness and overall quality which led to overwhelmingly good press reviews and an overall hype before release. Also the marketing material I saw was very neat and convincing and I saw it in a lot of places. I didn't see any of that for Deadfire.  If you weren't following Obsidian or WorldOfEternity on Twitter or roaming these forums I guess you would not have seen any marketing material for it...? Did somebody experience that campaign otherwise?

 

Edited January 12, 2020 by Boeroer

[xzar_monty]

37 minutes ago, Boeroer said:

I didn't see any of that for Deadfire.  If you weren't following Obsidian or WorldOfEternity on Twitter or roaming these forums I guess you would not have seen any marketing material for it...? Did somebody experience that campaign otherwise?

I never saw any marketing for PoE, and the only marketing for Deadfire I saw was within PoE (and of course through the forums, which I only looked at after PoE was already out). But that's just me. (So I heard about PoE through a friend of mine.)

Edited January 12, 2020 by xzar_monty

[Boeroer]

I think PoE's publicity mostly came from its Kickstarter campaign - and that it was promoted as "spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate from former Black Isle devs (now Obsidian)" which made several gaming magazines and -sites pick it up. 

 

[kanisatha]

18 hours ago, Boeroer said:

And of course user reviews are known data. As are surveys. They are very similar. Tell your favorite polling agency that they were working with non-data all the time...

In this case we even have significant sample sizes (around 10,000 reviews on Steam alone). Of course it doesn't need to be a representative sample of the population[sic] but a representative sample of PoE- or Deadfire players. If Pillars had sold 1,000,000 Steam copies then 10,000 Steam reviews is def. a representative sample size.

No you are blatantly wrong about this. Reviews are essentially anecdotal, and having a whole lot of them makes no difference whatsoever. The sample was not randomly selected, and as such provides zero validity. No respectable journal would publish a study based on online reviews. And yes, a biased sample *is* worse than no sample at all.

19 hours ago, xzar_monty said:

reacting to others with blatant and unfounded arrogance. So you don't look good in this, if I may be so bold as to point it out to you.

Nope, you guys are the ones directing blatant and unfounded arrogance at me. You three are part of a very small clique of posters here who think the forum belongs to you, that you are superior to everyone else in the forum and get to play at being gatekeepers of the forum, and everyone else must bow down to your "knowledge" and "wisdom." And its not just this thread but every thread in the forum in which you post. You constantly denigrate and put down any poster who dares to disagree with you or refuses to go along with your line on things, and in the process drive away any and all other posters from the thread so that you can monopolize the thread with your inane posts. The best threads in this forum are those where you are not involved, where thoughtful, civil and inclusive discussions take place. The moment any of you decide to jump into a thread it goes downhill very quickly thereafter, which is exactly what happened to this thread from where it first began. So I'm done with trying to discuss anything with you. Feel free to continue on with your silly little echo chamber "discussion."

[daven]

Ah I actually know the real reason... it's because there was no full dwarven companion!!!!

Edited January 12, 2020 by daven