Armchair theories on why POE2 didn't sell super well

[Boeroer]

@kanisatha

Interesting that you bring this up now when somebody doesn't agree with you. Before it didn't seem to bother you, the would-be champion of the downtrodden whom got caught in our devastating stampede. 

Or is it just...

Edited January 12, 2020 by Boeroer

[xzar_monty]

4 hours ago, kanisatha said:

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.

Seriously, you must be joking. I absolutely cannot believe that you can be serious with something as silly as this. But in case you are serious, give me one example of "us" (there is no us) denigrating or putting down a poster. Just one will be enough. I'm pretty sure there isn't even one, although you're saying it happens "constantly".

[Skazz]

1 hour ago, daven said:

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

YES! I've been saying that for ages.

Marry me now.

[Boeroer]

I'm so guilty. I sometimes oppose posters who want to start their forum career with a childish and irrational rant and then I insist on being reasonable. I know, I know: super lawful evil...

Or I called out SonicMage when he used the words "fact" and "truth" every time he voiced his subjective opinion. But so did everybody else... so maybe Sonic doesn't count.

But hey @xzar_monty - we clashed one or two times. Did you feel "put down" or "denigrated"? I mean I cried a bit but I got over it.

I also disagree with @thelee from time to time. It's a miracle he's still here after all those nasty attacks I launched. He def. took Thick-Skinned or Stoic Steel. Or both...

[Wormerine]

15 hours ago, Boeroer said:

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...

Marketing for Tyranny was abysmal. As someone who followed Obsidian, PoEs, and Tyranny specifically, I had little to no idea what Tyranny is (aside from borrowing PoE engine) and what I did know, turned out to be untrue. Little to no surprise there, that the game didn't find it's audience. 

[Bleak]

On 1/8/2020 at 10:26 AM, Boeroer said:

 So - if the problem was the execution of the things you asked above then the reviews should reflect that. Which they don't. So the overall quality and implementation of Deadfire doesn't seem to be the problem. But we discussed this in length already. 

So what you are saying is that you have concluded that the game is flawless enough so that its sales weren't affected, is that right? Can you blame me for being amused? 

On 1/8/2020 at 10:26 AM, Boeroer said:

So far we have collected some simple yet reasonable explanations why Deadfire dropped so hard (since reviews were on par which suggests implementation and quality was not the problem):

...... 

while your theory "they all closely monitored influencers" is really what explains it all:

Which sounds like a rather presumptuous approach that needed a refutation.

It's because mine is not a completely speculative theory, that wants to justify something mostly based on wishful assumptions which I don't have clear evidence on. That's why I find them amusing - not because I try to be edgy or critical. I just observe the problems the game has, which is the most practical/direct thing one can do - it's still a great game, but it is clear to me that it suffers as a CRPG both at quality and implementation. Already made detailed examples in the previous post and in the posts I linked in it. Reading the less-than-stellar reviews of the game, the "neutral" ones from RPS or Kotaku, or actually not avoiding reading criticism about the game, will give you some hints about how much people care about these intrinsic details. But then again, no point on leaning on reviews or the opinion of some greenhorn game journalist to indicate things that are more than obvious. Refuting my points is the easiest thing - you can just dismiss the importance of these problems - however I still think they are integral to a game of this genre.

[Boeroer]

Of course the game has its problems. It's just not easy to determine if what you identify as a problem is a problem for (so many) other players which then results in a massive sales drop of more than 500k copies. 

10k reviews of 1,000k sold copies is a good sample size. If the problems you identified annoyed as many players as you said then you would see that. I think it is very unlikely that a game that has problems which annoy and put off like 500k players would have a user score about 8.3 on Metacritic. 

Just because you made some observations, analyzed your problems with the game meticulously and phrased it nicely doesn't mean that a big bunch of other players felt the same. Of course you will find players who feel the same. But enough to explain such a sales disaster? I still don't think so. And where is the evidence that you mentioned? 

You found it amusing that posters said that it might be the setting which put potential players off. There's nothing amusing about it. It makes sense. One can't prove it without a big survey but it is not a far-fetched assumption.

It is more likely that a) many players see a setting/theme and decide that they will not buy the game than b) an equal amount of players watch streams, read critics on Kotaku etc. and then decide to not buy. 

I mean both can happen and most likely did happen and it would add up. It's not either/or. I just think that a) plays a bigger role since it takes nearly no time and no other investment than a glance to make that decision - while for b) you'd have to invest quite some time and motivation to do so. 

That's why I think there was no cause for amusement.

If you would have said something along the lines of "What I also think played a role was..." I would most likely have agreed.

But your "Setting? Lulz! It is my theory alone which really explains it all" approach prevented that. 

 

Edited January 13, 2020 by Boeroer

[thelee]

1 hour ago, Boeroer said:

Of course the game has its problems. It's just not easy to determine if what you identify as a problem is a problem for (so many) other players which then results in a massive sales drop of more than 500k copies. 

This is the constant, fundamental concern that I think a lot of people with "less big-picture" theories are missing.

It's one thing if the question was "why did Deadfire sell 5% less than PoE1 instead of exceeding its sales?" At that point, pretty much everyone's theories might be right, even ones that I would consider to be more fringe (e.g. Avellone no longer being on writing staff); I could easily see each critique cumulatively leading up to >50k sales lost (out of a million), along with some other big picture stuff that would have prevented Deadfire from exceeding PoE1's sales as a sequel to an ostensibly-well-received IP.

But that's not the question. The question is "why did Deadfire sell a mere fraction of PoE1, and even a fraction of Tyranny?" coupled with the known constraints of positive critical reviews and positive user reviews.

There are also related data points! That I'm going to repeat again - Like P:K having worse reviews and bigger stability problems, but selling far better than Deadfire. Tyranny being based on no established IP whatsoever which still outsold Deadfire, though apparently still disappointed.

Everyone is going to have their pet gripes about the game. I have my own pet gripes. But it's one thing to have a pet gripe, but if you're going to claim that that pet gripe is the cause of Deadfire's revenue woes, it has to be capable of explaining a massive sales expectation miss and be congruent with the known data points we have out there. For that reason I'm not going to come in here and say "power level scaling is real confusing and murky. that's the reason why Deadfire sold poorly!" even though that is my main gameplay critique of Deadfire.

edit - pretty much only one person actually tried to make a case that all the smaller gripes people were talking about added up collectively to explain the massive sales drop, but it's a pretty fairly unconvincing theory (and for kanisatha's accusations about being unwelcome, the person proposing this was way more hostile than anyone else in this thread). For one thing - many of the gripes generally requires people to have played the game, and that would somehow be reflected in user reviews. For another thing - occam's razor. "Big picture" stuff explains why the audience might have shrunk significantly but left a core of enthusiastic, happy players--which explains a massive sales drop but is still consistent with high critical/user reviews--and big picture stuff requires you to assume far less than a collection of smaller picture stuff that requires a lot of scaffolding and rationalizing away of the known data points (such as - users are not actually happy but something about them prevents them posting unhappy reviews... even though for example P:K had plenty of mediocre unhappy reviews but still tons of sales). Occam's razor would suggest you go for the hypothesis that requires you to take the fewest leaps of faith and rationalizations. (Also three: it's unclear that these different smaller theories are independent of each other, which requires even more heroic assumption-making about the impact of any specific gripe since they would have to carry more weight.)

Edited January 13, 2020 by thelee

[Silvaren]

It's sad irony that Josh Sawyer repeats during nearly every panel (at GDC, Digital Dragons etc.) that as a game director or designer he has to make a game which players want. A game that players will like and play - not the game what he would exactly like to make or play - unless he buy 2 milions copies of that game. He said that so many times! He laughed of it. Whenever someone ask him eg. why he made Sawyer's balancing mod for New Vegas and not incorporated it into base game as deffault. He said it changes what he thinks could work better but not for broader audience.

So he shaped Deadfire mostly upon feedback from PoE 1 players. With some exceptions ofcourse - like Obsidian managment forcing full VO very late during development process.

The only one thing he made of his own vision was took the action to exotic part of the world. Deadfire setting is less familiar (but many players I know didn't even see a difference about PoE 1 beeing more renaissance world than medieval ). What I observed while reading polish forums - people in my country didn't like Deadfire from one of two reasons.

1. "Pirate" setting (I would say it's more about explore and colonisation than pirate stuff). Seriously, even die hard fans of first PoE (like professional journalist/reviewers) were displeased by tone and atmosphere of exotic world. 

2. "Divinity: Original Sin II is better than Pillars!" - It's the second argument. I finished first game and I was borred to death. I started D:OS 2 two times and both times I abandoned at the end of Act II. Maybe some day I will force myself to start over for the third time and finish it, but I doubt it. These games has very simple ruleset and repetitive combat. But Divinity OS 2 sold 5 millions copies? Maybe it's me who just don't enjoy it, maybe it's good game. Imo it's great pseudo-hardcore cRPG for casuals with full 3D graphics, console release and coop - so it's popular & awesome & fun for people who probably never played something more complex than AAA RPG. You know - like "Witcher 3 is the best RPG ever made", repeated by people who never play RPG (or only most popular AAA RPG). So many people are saying about new standards set by Witcher 3. When I think about standards in RPG, I think of Fallout in 1997. But maybe it's just me. What I mean exactly - PoE II Deadfire is niche game. I would say that Pathfinder: Kingmaker is more popular thanks to the p&p RPG build upon displeased fans of D&D 3.5 when 4th Edition hit the stores. It's very popular RPG, so it's computer adaptation - basically the first one - is huge for many fans and players arround the world. Both D:OS 2 and Kingmaker are less niche games than Pillars.

I observed even third reason - but it was on polish forums back in 2015 when first Pillars came out. Many players didn't like first game as much as Baldur's Gate II. Most of them didn't play BG II since 2000. Rest of them are members of the church of the one true game and its name is BG II and nothing can be better even if it's better in some way. They just don't want anything new. It is the same situation with Heroes of Might & Magic. People who started with the third game in the series and never played first or the second or any of the newer instalment will despise anything what isn't HoMM III. Even if some gameplay changes in IV, V, VI and VII are for the better. Even if HoMM III used blurred sprites from M&M VII (or was it MM VIII?) and has nothing similar with artstyle of first two HoMM games.

/sorry for bad english

EDIT:

So PoE was designed for fans of the Infinity Engine Games and most of them don't want anything new.

Afaik there is big group of people on RPG Codex (I don't visit that place) and few different forums I actually read who just don't like RTwP because it's SH!T! They use phrases like: "Good RPG, RTwP - pick one". They took hate for RTwP to another level.

Edited January 13, 2020 by Silvaren

[thelee]

24 minutes ago, Silvaren said:

"Pirate" setting (I would say it's more about explore and colonisation than pirate stuff). Seriously, even die hard fans of first PoE (like professional journalist/reviewers) were displeased by tone and atmosphere of exotic world.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, given that the marketing for the console release is significantly downplaying the pirate/ship-sailing elements of the game, I think it's safe to assume that at least  the console port developer agrees with this line of reasoning. (Or as someone else said, this is something they can change at this point in time, so they are.)

 

When I reflect on this, I think this is an area where JE Sawyer has a bit of denial, because he said in post that he didn't really think of Deadfire as a pirate-themed game. But on top of whatever marketing leading up to release, they literally had a couple of small DLC that added various forms of booze, new beards, new sailors, new ships, new ship-gear, and Mirke (literally a drunken pirate) as a sidekick. They were obviously leaning into it pretty hard at first. But in retrospect, it might be telling that when the small DLC evaporated after a few months - they either decided to pivot and focus on the bigger story DLC, and/or maybe they were already realizing that the pirate theme wasn't working out for them.

 

Maybe PoE1 was a better balance in setting? I loved the shift to renaissance era, but the shift was subtle enough that (like you mention) maybe a lot of the more "conservative" players wouldn't have noticed (except for the guns, and even some D&D campaigns had guns). A similar approach would've been to set a lot of Deadfire in a more traditional medieval RPG setting and then have only parts of it in the more polynesian Deadfire. (A home base in Old Vailia and you sail out with the Valian Trading Company, maybe?)

Edited January 13, 2020 by thelee

[Boeroer]

Iirc the majority of PoE players who took part in the survey (after PoE and DLCs got released) wished for Aedyr or the Living Lands as place for a sequel. I think it was in that survey but maybe there was another one. Whatever...

Same result in a poll we had here in the forums. Old Vailia was also among the more popular votes I believe. Not much is known about the Living Lands (seems to be a bit on the "jurassic" side - humongous beasts and plants and stuff), but it seems that all of them would have been a more classic setting than the Deadfire Archipelago is.

Now I like the Deadfire Archipelago. I think Obsidian did a great job with the history, lore and worldbuilding. But if you had asked me before how I feel about the Deadfie Archipelago as setting for PoE2 I would most likely have said "meh".

Man I really hope we will see some other games in the PoE universe. That world has grown on me. 

Edited January 13, 2020 by Boeroer

[Skazz]

1 hour ago, Silvaren said:

I observed even third reason - but it was on polish forums back in 2015 when first Pillars came out. Many players didn't like first game as much as Baldur's Gate II. Most of them didn't play BG II since 2000. Rest of them are members of the church of the one true game and its name is BG II and nothing can be better even if it's better in some way. They just don't want anything new. It is the same situation with Heroes of Might & Magic. People who started with the third game in the series and never played first or the second or any of the newer instalment will despise anything what isn't HoMM III. Even if some gameplay changes in IV, V, VI and VII are for the better. Even if HoMM III used blurred sprites from M&M VII (or was it MM VIII?) and has nothing similar with artstyle of first two HoMM games.

This may not have much to do with the general gist of this thread, but honestly? I wish I could give you a high-five for this part right now.  Like you, I am Polish, and the very Polish phenomenon you're describing has been bothering me ever since I got my first serious Internet access.

I do not presume to understand where this extreme gaming conservatism comes from, but it is certainly doubly visible within the Polish gaming community. Or perhaps it is mostly a genre thing? I have no idea.

Edited January 13, 2020 by Skazz

[Boeroer]

Maybe because playing RPGs used to be a nerdy thing - and people who did it formed rel. secluded groups. And maybe once you find something you can finally identify with it's hard to let go?
 

Also: age and the "everything was better in the old days" syndrome.

[uuuhhii]

after finishing greedfall

the quality of deadfire are even more obvious

deadfire are what player needed but not what they asked for

Edited January 14, 2020 by uuuhhii

[algroth]

Again, there's an elephant in the room regarding Deadfire's dip in sales that no perception of quality can account for, I feel. The dip the franchise saw in performance wasn't a 10-20% or a 50% even, or a lack of continued interest or whatnot. From what I understand, the first game in the series has already sold about 2 million copies whilst the new one has struggled to make it to 400k. That's a 70-80% drop right there, and one for a game that, despite assumptions of the contrary, is generally rated quite positively across all user aggregate websites out there, including a 7.8 metascore, an 84% Steam user approval and a 4.4/5 GOG rating.

Moreover, let's consider some notorious sequels to popular franchises:

• Dragon Age 2: roughly 2 million copies sold by August 2011 (down 50% from its predecessor)
• Mass Effect 3: roughly 1.5 million copies in its first month (100% up from its predecessor), roughly 6 million total (down from Mass Effect 2's 7 million)
• Mass Effect: Andromeda: an estimated 2.5 million copes sold across its lifetime (down 60% approx from Mass Effect 3)
• BioShock 2: 3 million copies (down 25% from the 4 million sold by its predecessor)
• Fallout 4: roughly 14.9 million units sold (up 50% over the next highest-grossing Fallout game, Fallout 3)
• Batman: Arkham Knight: 5 units sold in the first four months (down 17% from Arkham City by the same point)

And more. It's arguable that all of these examples were met with much more vitriol from the gamer community and proved to be way more divisive if not outright trashed by the fanbase than Deadfire, yet the latter's drop far exceeds even the worst ones here. What's more, some games that were deemed disappointing relative to their predecessors even went *up* in sales relative to their previous entries as well, which goes to show how much the insular jabber of the diehard community often matters in these things. To be fair, Deadfire is a smaller game and thus likely more exposed to such talk - but again, when the talk wasn't even that negative to begin with, it's hard to point out to it as a major factor in the drop in sales.

Edited January 17, 2020 by algroth

[Boeroer]

Isn't the 2 million copies of PoE including console sales? If yes then we should compare that number to the sales of Deadfire once it comes to consoles (release shouldn't be too far away).

Besides that: exactly (one of) my point(s) but phrased way better.

[wih]

I'm starting to think it was just a perfect storm of negative factors that led to such drop in sales. A critical miss.

[Elric Galad]

Someone rolled a 1.

[Skazz]

1 hour ago, Elric Galad said:

Someone rolled a 1.

Spoiler

 

Edited January 18, 2020 by Skazz

[vyvexthorne]

To me, it simply looks like the first game didn't inspire confidence in a lot of players. If you look at the Steam Achievements .. Not even half the players got through the first act (46.7%) and only 13% actually finished the game. That's not good. When it comes to the second game it was mainly just the die hard fans that bought it.  Less people bought the 2nd game but they were bigger fans and the achievements reflect that with 67% at least getting the first achievement and a story completion rate of 19.5%.   (pretty much all games have a crappy completion percent. That says more about gaming culture as a whole than anything else.)  

Edited January 19, 2020 by vyvexthorne

[thelee]

1 hour ago, vyvexthorne said:

If you look at the Steam Achievements .. Not even half the players got through the first act (46.7%) and only 13% actually finished the game.

this has been discussed before, with evidence, but basically: hardly anyone ever finishes any game all the way through. steam achievement rates for other RPGs are similarly extremely low (even as sequels sold well). you can't really conclude anything based on poe1's.

[Boeroer]

Right. One counterexample: Battle Brothers* has low achievement rates (for the achievements you can't collect on a flyby) because it's a hard game - yet it sold very well an more importantly in this case its DLCs sell well. That indicates that players who bought the base game felt good enough about it to also buy the DLCs. They even announced a new DLC that will come out this year - seems that they sell well enough to be lucrative. 

Same argument could be made for PoE. I don't know the sales numbers of WM I & II compared to the base game. If the DLCs sold well then I'd assume the buyers of PoE weren't too disappointed. If not then that could be a hint that the base game disappointed many that bought it. But afaik WM I & II were successes, weren't they?

Could also be a hint for the disappointment rate of Deadfire: how well did the DLCs?

 

*I know I keep mentioning Battle Brothers a lot lately. That's because I'm replaying it right now and it's better to use examples from games I actually know well...

 

[Bleak]

On 1/13/2020 at 8:51 PM, Boeroer said:

Of course the game has its problems. It's just not easy to determine if what you identify as a problem is a problem for (so many) other players which then results in a massive sales drop of more than 500k copies. 

10k reviews of 1,000k sold copies is a good sample size. If the problems you identified annoyed as many players as you said then you would see that. I think it is very unlikely that a game that has problems which annoy and put off like 500k players would have a user score about 8.3 on Metacritic. 

Just because you made some observations, analyzed your problems with the game meticulously and phrased it nicely doesn't mean that a big bunch of other players felt the same. Of course you will find players who feel the same. But enough to explain such a sales disaster? I still don't think so. And where is the evidence that you mentioned? 

You found it amusing that posters said that it might be the setting which put potential players off. There's nothing amusing about it. It makes sense. One can't prove it without a big survey but it is not a far-fetched assumption.

It is more likely that a) many players see a setting/theme and decide that they will not buy the game than b) an equal amount of players watch streams, read critics on Kotaku etc. and then decide to not buy. 

I mean both can happen and most likely did happen and it would add up. It's not either/or. I just think that a) plays a bigger role since it takes nearly no time and no other investment than a glance to make that decision - while for b) you'd have to invest quite some time and motivation to do so. 

That's why I think there was no cause for amusement.

If you would have said something along the lines of "What I also think played a role was..." I would most likely have agreed.

But your "Setting? Lulz! It is my theory alone which really explains it all" approach prevented that. 

Again, I never claimed to have made a survey about "how many people care about these problems", nor did I claim to know that this was the only reason the game didn't sell well. I just pointed out some practical gameplay problems, which we are able to identify by playing the game and without making any surveys - unlike the "setting theory", which is based on pure speculation, for which you *do* actually need a survey, if you want to make these claims.

And that's why I found it amusing - because some people seem to prefer making pure speculations, instead of first examining what is right in front of them. And I obviously disagree with that speculation, so I wouldn't say "what I so think played a role was...", unless I was dishonest.

Let me stop you there before you say "oh so you are able to identify the problems by playing the game after all", ergo, "so these shouldn't really have affected sales", like you have said earlier. Proliferation is what creates traction and people don't just watch reviews or peruse stores to buy games anymore. Marketing is only starting and then stoking the fire. It obviously is very important, but social media (steam, twitter, twitch, fb, etc) are even more so, in this day and age. Put simply, proliferation happens by "word of mouth" - which translates to tweets, posts, wishlists, recommendations, streamers etc etc. Streamers themselves work with traction in their majority (it's like any market would be) - because it is their job and make money off of it. A poorly proliferated game (for whatever reason) will have less viewers, streamers, recommendations and traction. So don't underestimate the value of intrinsic characteristics when it comes to sales. 

Edited January 19, 2020 by Bleak

[algroth]

56 minutes ago, Bleak said:

Again, I never claimed to have made a survey about "how many people care about these problems", nor did I claim to know that this was the only reason the game didn't sell well. I just pointed out some practical gameplay problems, which we are able to identify by playing the game and without making any surveys - unlike the "setting theory", which is based on pure speculation, for which you *do* actually need a survey, if you want to make these claims.

And that's why I found it amusing - because some people seem to prefer making pure speculations, instead of first examining what is right in front of them. And I obviously disagree with that speculation, so I wouldn't say "what I so think played a role was...", unless I was dishonest.

Let me stop you there before you say "oh so you are able to identify the problems by playing the game after all", ergo, "so these shouldn't really have affected sales", like you have said earlier. Proliferation is what creates traction and people don't just watch reviews or peruse stores to buy games anymore. Marketing is only starting and then stoking the fire. It obviously is very important, but social media (steam, twitter, twitch, fb, etc) are even more so, in this day and age. Put simply, proliferation happens by "word of mouth" - which translates to tweets, posts, wishlists, recommendations, streamers etc etc. Streamers themselves work with traction in their majority (it's like any market would be) - because it is their job and make money off of it. A poorly proliferated game (for whatever reason) will have less viewers, streamers, recommendations and traction. So don't underestimate the value of intrinsic characteristics when it comes to sales. 

I would keep in mind that this thread is titled "Armchair theories on why PoE2 didn't sell super well". The thread is openly inviting us to speculate and no one is assuming otherwise. As far as speculations go, assessing the quality of the game and the effects it has on word of mouth and its public perception by extension is a fair point to make, but what we've spoken about earlier is that the word of mouth that is available or most immediately accessible through user reviews, aggregate scores, YouTube reviews and comments and whatnot, all tend pretty positively, so the evidence we have available doesn't align with the hypothesis. And whilst there are criticisms that could be levied at the game, they are *way* too specific for most random comments on social media to pick up on. It's one thing to say "ship stronghold is bad" (which I haven't read anywhere or not in any fashion so prevalent so as to stick in my mind as a common complaint), it's another to say, for example, "ship upgrades could have been better handled by being woven into a stronghold-specific narrative and made more significant that way, instead of being items free to purchase the moment you arrive to Neketaka": social media and word of mouth tends to move according to very essentialist broad takes on a certain piece opposite to the specifics, the talk about the specifics is something that usually only interests people who're already familiar with the game at hand. What Boeroer is getting to, I believe, as well as I, is that the criticisms may at best discourage a certain niche of players, but they would likely be a negligible amount in the greater scheme of things. Again, this is a game that saw a 70% drop from game to game and yet was positively received all around, and focusing on whatever nitpicks we have of it is too esoteric and losing the wider picture.

I do agree that social media is a strong promoter for games and especially non-AAA games, and some of the fault can be placed there. I'm just a little hesitant of assuming "word of mouth" is the issue, or at least the resulting word of mouth of people who played the game (could be that a lot of people assumed the game didn't *look* very good and the continued voicing of their indifference cooled others who were mildly intrigued as well), since it was primarily pretty positive throughout. I have some other thoughts myself about potential factors here too, which I've voiced on another thread, namely regarding Deadfire as a streaming experience in a very streaming-driven era:

 

Edited January 19, 2020 by algroth

[Wormerine]

9 hours ago, Boeroer said:

But afaik WM I & II were successes, weren't they?

Could also be a hint for the disappointment rate of Deadfire: how well did the DLCs?

I would be curious to learn how well DLCs for Deadfire sold as well, compared to base game.

If I remember well WM didn't return on the investment. I think it was mentioned when discussing why DLC model for Deadfire changed to smaller, individual adventures. I don't have the source, though.