How would you increase PoE2 sale at this moment ?

[ekt0]

I really like this game and it saddens me that the current sale total is less than expected. Thus, I wonder if there is any way for Obsidian to increase the game's sale count as of now in year 2020.

For me, I would propose :

1. Fix bugs, maybe not all of them but at least all major ones.
2. Persuade streamers to play this game on their channel with the minimum cost required.
    

Edited July 5, 2020 by ekt0

[wih]

I thought the major bugs were fixed?

[the_dog_days]

They already spent a ton of money on Deadfire and it only just break even a few months ago. It's estimated that the budget of Deadfire pre-release was over 10 million. Then they made the DLCs, a bunch of bonus free content, new sub classes, and a turn-style mode. Just about anyone who was going to buy Deadfire on PC already has. That doesn't mean there aren't people out there who wouldn't love it if they gave it a shot, but odds are if they haven't by now they never will.

[Wormerine]

They should pour more money into ship combat.... that would fix everything 

[thelee]

2 hours ago, the_dog_days said:

They already spent a ton of money on Deadfire and it only just break even a few months ago.

where did this news come from? if true, i'm glad they at least broke even, because i was worried the sales were so low it contributed to some insolvency threat that made them sell to microsoft. (it could still have, but at least it's not as bad as i feared)

 

14 hours ago, ekt0 said:

I really like this game and it saddens me that the current sale total is less than expected. Thus, I wonder if there is any way for Obsidian to increase the game's sale count as of now in year 2020.

i sadly believe that there's not much to be done. i suspect there's no "mainstream" IE-style genre and what we saw was just a happy fad in the 90s and a brief recurrence over the past few years. PoE1 benefited a lot from nostalgia and bandwagon-interest. That nostalgia well has dried up, and it's strikingly difficult (possibly impossible) to bridge the gap between 90s-era RTwP mechanics and the types of games newer, younger (more profitably big) audiences like.  i've heard other games have also hit hurdles with declining sales in successive attempts.

that being said, a studio can be "smart" about it. I think a contributing factor is that Deadfire wasn't "smart" about it - so we had full VO and ship-to-ship combat and blew up the budget and it made it all the more critical to have big sales, which then didn't materialize. Disco Elysium was a critical hit and fan favorite... for a small, core group of fans.  But it was also much "smarter" about it - no full VO, streamlined mechanics, nothing extraneous.

but the ship has sailed for deadfire. Don't chase good money after bad - also known as the sunk-cost fallacy. Most of a game's sales comes soon after release, and I don't think there's anything that can be done to boost sales significantly, and I don't think there's any sort of cost-benefit math that works out in favor of them doing it.

 

We got turn-based mode, but from what it sounded like it was someone's spare-time project that they decided to just put in a few staff members to help get it over the finish line. I hope the extra interest in Deadfire covered the SWE-hours invested in it, but I think it clearly showed how barebones of an effort it was because the game stability broke irrevocably from having done it. (I will always be a bit bitter about it, even if 5.0 is still rather stable compared to 4.0... it's still a regression from earlier versions).

Edited July 6, 2020 by thelee

[the_dog_days]

1 hour ago, thelee said:

where did this news come from?

Josh Sawyer's tweets.

[Boeroer]

I can confirm that. He wrote about it not too long ago.

[Wormerine]

Tried to find the tweet but, man, Josh tweets a lot. Still, good news. 

[thelee]

Found the tweet (sorry sent it to myself from a screenshot on my phone, so no direct link)

 

[thelee]

Bad for people who bought fig shares, I think, though. "break even" is different from "made enough money to trigger a profit off of fig share dividends" which seemed to be based on wildly optimistic numbers. I maintain that the fig shares were borderline a scam, and I put that firmly on Feargus's shoulers.

Edited July 9, 2020 by thelee

[Belsirk]

On 7/5/2020 at 8:59 PM, wih said:

I thought the major bugs were fixed?

At the time they introduced the turn-based model they broken the  original one.

[DozingDragon]

On 7/6/2020 at 9:14 AM, thelee said:

Bad for people who bought fig shares, I think, though. "break even" is different from "made enough money to trigger a profit off of fig share dividends". I maintain that the fig shares were borderline a scam, and I put that firmly on Feargus's shoulers.

I remember feeling like it was a red flag when Fig seemed to be surprised when the SEC came knocking regarding the sale of securities. 

[Boeroer]

Care to elaborate (like what's SEC, what exactly happened, when and why)?

[the_dog_days]

8 hours ago, Boeroer said:

Care to elaborate (like what's SEC, what exactly happened, when and why)?

Some time within the first year of Deadfire's release investors filed a complaint to the SEC about payouts. Nothing came of it.

[DozingDragon]

On 7/10/2020 at 3:51 AM, Boeroer said:

Care to elaborate (like what's SEC, what exactly happened, when and why)?

Oh, they seemed to struggle a lot to actually get their offering circulars out initially. You can check out their initial filings, amended filings, and correspondence with the SEC here. 

[Helz]

On 7/5/2020 at 3:50 PM, the_dog_days said:

Just about anyone who was going to buy Deadfire on PC already has. That doesn't mean there aren't people out there who wouldn't love it if they gave it a shot, but odds are if they haven't by now they never will.

I finally bought Deadfire last month. I backed the first PoE, but didn't start playing it until it was patched and all of the DLCs were released. I wanted to experience the finished version. I didn't complete it until well after Deadfire came out.

Watching the forum, I could tell that the sequel was being reworked even more than the original had been. I could afford to wait.

I think its great news that Obsidian already broke even on Deadfire. That means that sales from here on are profit, and this is the type of game that ages really well. The game has maintained a relatively high price for how long its been out. I expect it will be a steady revenue stream for Obsidian for a long time to come.

[wih]

And here is the answer of Obsidian. They will increase sales of POE 1/2 by announcing and creating a first person RPG in the same setting, which will be their answer to Skyrim and as a result of this all the hardcore Avowed fans will play POE 1/2 and will be calling the other Avowed fans noobs if they don't.

[ekt0]

I am now curious about this new game Avowed. Perhaps, it is a new PoE disguised in a new name ?

[thelee]

5 hours ago, ekt0 said:

I am now curious about this new game Avowed. Perhaps, it is a new PoE disguised in a new name ?

it is set in the world of eora, that much is certain. i don't think anything else about "PoE" will be kept, though I hope some of the mechanics are retained (in much the same way a lot of the fallout SPECIAL mechanics were kept in some shape or form into Fallout 3 and New Vegas before being thoroughly altered in 4 and 76).

[Amy Yeomans]

Fix your crap. Stop trying to sell an item that is to glitchy. Quests can’t be completed and I spend more time waiting for the game to load than I actually spend playing the game. This game needs a MAJOR patch. Focus I. That and the game would sell itself. I would not recommend this game in its current state.

[Amy Yeomans]

On 7/5/2020 at 12:59 PM, wih said:

I thought the major bugs were fixed?

They were not. I can’t complete the “Mapping the Archipelago: West Wakara Reef” quest. I have cleared out the island and named it however, every time I go to see Santa, he does not have a response to my character finding and naming the island. On top of that the game constantly crashes with error messages. This game freezes often during big battles. Major fixes should happen in order for me to recommend this game and anyone else who streams or plays.

Edited August 8, 2020 by Amy Yeomans
Autocorrected Wakara to Walmart.

[evilcat]

Start making POE3 and sell Trilogy package?

This could be combined with some last bug fixing and polishing and some asset related to new part (items, portraits) .

[xzar_monty]

8 hours ago, Amy Yeomans said:

They were not. I can’t complete the “Mapping the Archipelago: West Wakara Reef” quest. I have cleared out the island and named it however, every time I go to see Santa, he does not have a response to my character finding and naming the island.

There is more than one island, and once you've named them all, you will get a message saying the quest can proceed. It's likely (but not certain) that you simply haven't finished the quest, in which case everything is as it should be.

Edited August 8, 2020 by xzar_monty

[Boeroer]

16 hours ago, Amy Yeomans said:

They were not. I can’t complete the “Mapping the Archipelago: West Wakara Reef” quest. I have cleared out the island and named it however, every time I go to see Santa, he does not have a response to my character finding and naming the island. On top of that the game constantly crashes with error messages. This game freezes often during big battles. Major fixes should happen in order for me to recommend this game and anyone else who streams or plays.

That's not a major bug. That's most likely you just you missing one or two other islands to complete the quest.

It sounds as if you are playing the console version. Note that Obsidian did not develop/port them but only did the PC version. Which is rel. bug-free. I say relatively because naturally you can't fix all bugs in such a huge and complex game during the support time in an economically sound way. 

Edited August 8, 2020 by Boeroer

[Almaar]

I was highly critical of the game and after watching the post-portem talk Josh Sawyer did last year i get why it felt so rough and not as polished around the edges especially when it first came out. But even though i was disappointed in some respects it's not a bad game, the reviews are positive so it's clear that the quality of it has nothing to do with the lack in sales. 

 

When PoE was announced people, especially fans of the infinity engine games, were eager for something like it. The market wasn't saturated and i believe it was also one of the first successful kickstarter projects. After that we've seen many games and for the exception of Original Sin 2 (which focus on different aspects) none of them was that successful.

 

It breaks my heart to say but it seems to be too much of a niche genre to be a flagship title for Obsidian or any company really. But if you look at how thing are now with supposedly flagship titles like Avowed and Outer Worlds, i think in the future there could be room for games like this you know, smaller projects like Grounded is. 

 

Finally to go back on topic  I don't think there's a lot you can do right now. I saw that the standard and Obsidian editions are still 40 and 60$ and in my opinion, especially if you consider how harsh this year was and still is for many people, it's a bit too much. I'd lower the price by 10$.

 

 

 

Edited August 13, 2020 by Almaar