Trying to figure what PoE2 sold less

[Boeroer]

9 hours ago, Munky_ said:

This is anecdotal, but the setting of Deadfire did not appeal to my group of friends.  Magic on the high seas is a cool concept, but to base an entire game around the setting might have been a bit much.  Maybe people need to feel grounded to something more traditional if the IP is unfamiliar?  It's a shame because it's a beautiful game.

And this is a point that I can get behind -  because you don't need to buy or even experience the game first (--> sale) in order to see something that repels you. Seeing a setting, genre or art style that you don't like will most likely prevent you from buying (--> no sale) and would also prevent you from writing any review about it (--> no bad influence on reviews).

Same goes for lack of marketing/flying under the radar bc. of different reasons (unknown IP, too little budget, bad marketing decisions, smaller crowdfunding platform etc.).

In order to be able to logically explain the drop of sales one must focus on arguments that take into account that PoE sold well, reviews were good and that similar games with even worse reviews did well, too.

Most other reasons brought forth (too much text, graphics, story, bugs, game mechanics whatever) need you to buy or at least play the game and that would not only NOT mean that sales would drop but also that reviews or both PoE and Deadfire would be worse (they are good and ratings by users and critics almost similar). Then several of those reasons would also lead to similar games having bad sales - which did not happen.

Also, if those latter points (wall of text, graphics, story, bugs etc.) were the reason for dropping sales then how would one explain that Deadfire did break even and then even made a good profit in the long run? It has a very long tail for a video game these days - but those points above didn't change a bit. So did the potential players all change their mind about those issues at some point? Unlikely...

More likely imo that potential players only slowly discovered that game they previously didn't know about. Or potential buyers thought they wouldn't like that game bc. of superfical reasons (such as apparent setting, style etc.) but bought it way later after seeing and hearing more about it and it turned out to be cool. 

So those are my argumets (again, written down like for the fifth time or so) and I think in terms of logic, probability and simplicity (also see Occam's Razor) they make pretty good sense on their own - while some other arguments need several secodary conditions (e.g. "they didn't buy the game but saw it in streams") to explain why they would lead to a massive sales drop while reviews stay good and sales are slow but didn't stop until the intitially bombed game turned into a profitable one. 

   

Edited August 29, 2022 by Boeroer

[xzar_monty]

Btw, how massive was the massive? I understand it was pretty bad, but I haven't seen the numbers -- and I'm not sure if they're in the public domain.

[Boeroer]

In the resp. year of release PoE sold +500K copies while Deadfire only sold +100K. I don't know the long term sales numbers though. I only read (mostly Twitter-) messages of Josh and some other devs who reported the break-even point of Deadfire and then somewhat later said that it made a profit in the long run.

But one can imagine that it's a big disappointment if a sequel (initially) sells a fifth of the copies of the original game.  

 

Edited August 29, 2022 by Boeroer

[thelee]

10 hours ago, Munky_ said:

This is anecdotal, but the setting of Deadfire did not appeal to my group of friends.  Magic on the high seas is a cool concept, but to base an entire game around the setting might have been a bit much.  Maybe people need to feel grounded to something more traditional if the IP is unfamiliar?  It's a shame because it's a beautiful game.

i think this theory keeps getting support every time Josh Sawyer has to tell someone that Deadfire is not a "pirate game."

[Telas]

When POE first came out you could count cRPG's in one hand. Of course people will buy and enjoy it for what it is. When POE2 came out, the market was already fully satiated with a big list of meaty cRPG's and having options allows you to be more peaky and pedantic with a purchase. If 5%(random number) of POE players didn't like the walls of text, some others the combat system or the graphics or the story or whatever else, they could afford to look elsewhere. POE2 wasn't the only option in the market. 

 

Reviewers can't even influence their own grandmothers anymore so let's stop pretending that positive/negative reviews do anything sales wise.  Give a 5% special offer to Cyberpunk and watch it stay as a Steam top sale for days

Edited August 30, 2022 by Telas

[xzar_monty]

41 minutes ago, Telas said:

When POE first came out you could count cRPG's in one hand. Of course people will buy and enjoy it for what it is. When POE2 came out, the market was already fully satiated with a big list of meaty cRPG's and having options allows you to be more peaky and pedantic with a purchase.

Really? If I remember correctly, the only competitor POE2 had was D:OS2, which had come out about 10 months earlier, so even that was more akin to old news. P:K was not out when POE2 was released. Please, if you have this "big list" you speak of, do give me at least five names from it, I'd like to check them out. I can't think of any, honestly.

[Telas]

1 hour ago, xzar_monty said:

Really? If I remember correctly, the only competitor POE2 had was D:OS2, which had come out about 10 months earlier, so even that was more akin to old news. P:K was not out when POE2 was released. Please, if you have this "big list" you speak of, do give me at least five names from it, I'd like to check them out. I can't think of any, honestly.

The Shadowrun series, Wasteland 2 which was heavily marketed as a Fallout 2 spiritual successor, Underrail, Tyranny, the Original Sin series, and in the meantime people were waiting for Pathfinder, Wasteland 3, Encased and Solasta to come out. Busy decade for cRPG's especially if you count DLC's and Director's Cut versions in there. I certainly had plenty of options to pick other than POE2. Wasteland 2&3 and the Pathfinder series are excellent choices.

Edited August 30, 2022 by Telas

[xzar_monty]

Ok, thanks. I don't regard any of those as competitors to POE, as they're all remarkably different in terms of setting and/or gameplay, except for Pathfinder, which only came out after Deadfire. The Pathfinder games are excellent choices in theory, but the writing is so poor that there's no comparison in that regard to the POE games.

[Boeroer]

As I said: secondary conditions. Lots of "ifs" just to make one's theory somewhat plausible in comparison to the simple ones.

All that didn't seem to have hurt the sales of Tyranny, Pathfinder, Solasta etc. which had worse reviews from critics and users. 

One certainly has had plenty of options to pick something other than one of those titles, too. Sales of all those alternatives with worse reviews should have been low then as well. Did not happen.

So what is more likely to make players stay away from a cRPG that has better reviews and scores than the alternatives?

a) "I bought PoE but I didn't like it a lot because of the numerous shortcomings it has. But I didn't ever bother to write anything bad about it either - and when Deadfire came out it surely looked nice and interesting and all... but suddenly there were so many alternatives that had worse ratings - so I picked those instead." 

or

b) "Look, first of all I didn't know that Deadfire even existed, right? Never saw it on Kickstarter or so. So then when I learned about it it was reviewed quite favorably but it looked like a somewhat light-hearted pirates-of-the-carribean-themed game. Heck, it didn't even have a multiplayer option so I thought that wasn't my cup of tea and thus I bought something else. Until later it became more apparent that it's not a pirate game... and then it went on sale and I thought 'eh whatever', bought and played it and it was actually very cool. Hence see the review I wrote." 

Edited August 31, 2022 by Boeroer

[thelee]

if "more competition" is really the issue, then you'd expect sales/audience to drop off of all the other games, but as far as i can tell, DOS2, Wasteland 3, WOTR all out-performed DOS, Wasteland 2, P:K.

similarly, it's clear obsidian was expecting a bigger hit with Deadfire than with PoE1 so ultimately, it's not just the sales drop from PoE1 that is a big mystery, but also the sales drop from where a generic PoE2 should have been at, versus where it ended up being.

[Boeroer]

24 minutes ago, thelee said:

if "more competition" is really the issue, then you'd expect sales/audience to drop off of all the other games

Exactly. Especially all those games that were reviewed less favorably.

I agree though that being part of a big IP such as D&D/Pathfinder etc. will help a game even if it's not as good or if the marketing campaign sucked - just because the IP in itself is a big publicity factor nd also a factor for customer (player) loyalty.

So if you launch a game with a rel. fresh IP (Eora) on an unknown crowdfunding platform (fig.co), use a rel. niche gaming mode which is rel. unpopular atm (RTwP), choose an unorthodox setting ("Pirates, arrr!"), drop the ball with marketing (saw a ton of Tyranny ads everywhere - but nothing much outside of Twitter for Deadfire), have no multiplayer (which draws significant audience to titles like D:OS) - I just assume it's enough individual reasons to let a game not sell well. Add increased competition (also in terms of price) and maybe a little bit of saturation for nostalgia-fed games and the game might indeed tank at release.
And all of those points don't require to actually buy and play the game in order to take effect. They prevent you from buying the game just like that. 

 

[Boeroer]

41 minutes ago, thelee said:

similarly, it's clear obsidian was expecting a bigger hit with Deadfire than with PoE1 so ultimately, it's not just the sales drop from PoE1 that is a big mystery, but also the sales drop from where a generic PoE2 should have been at, versus where it ended up being.

I mean Feargus must've thought Deadfire would sell really well. How else could he justify to add Full VO near the freaking END of the production just to match D:OS2. Wild...  

[thelee]

42 minutes ago, Boeroer said:

(saw a ton of Tyranny ads everywhere - but nothing much outside of Twitter for Deadfire)

Josh Sawyer mentioned he had been griping about the marketing for a game he worked on. He obviously didn't specify which game, but I have to imagine it's Deadfire, right? There's evidence of the marketing guy getting fired/not having contract renewed. There's also the fact that the Steam page/ultimate edition now completely downplays ship imagery (whereas the backer mouse pad I have reflects the imagery they were going for originally, which is high seas fantasy). And, like you say, I learned about Tyranny through promotions and such and I can still recall the highly stylized art in the promos, whereas I backed Deadfire and barely saw anything about it.

Edited August 31, 2022 by thelee

[Boeroer]

Yeah.

And obviously we'll have to repeat all these points in a few months again because nobody will reread all this before posting and that's why

Edited September 1, 2022 by Boeroer

[xzar_monty]

Oh I agree, I didn't think "more competition" was the issue. I just wanted to know what the competition was, and I don't think there was that much of it, having seen the answer.

[Yougottawanna]

I wonder if they'll release updated sales figures now, all this time later... I would hope that the overall quality of the game (IMO) would lead to a healthy "tail".

Also Microsoft bought them and it appears that "Avowed" (FPRPG set in Eora) is still being made, so maybe they see potential in the setting - I certainly do...

[Elric Galad]

On 9/14/2022 at 1:30 AM, Yougottawanna said:

I wonder if they'll release updated sales figures now, all this time later... I would hope that the overall quality of the game (IMO) would lead to a healthy "tail".

Also Microsoft bought them and it appears that "Avowed" (FPRPG set in Eora) is still being made, so maybe they see potential in the setting - I certainly do...

What we know for sure is that the game broke even at some point. Now the remaining tail should be generating some minor profit.

It can be argued that Obsidian made some marketing errors but that the quality of their game prevented a complete failure. Videogames is an uncertain industry, so being unable to fail is a significant ceiling for any investor. Overall "PoE1 + PoE2" was still a great success.

But that might be the reason why Avowed seems to have a more classical setting and less niche gameplay than RTwP Isometric CRPG...

Edited September 18, 2022 by Elric Galad

[thelee]

On 9/13/2022 at 4:30 PM, Yougottawanna said:

I wonder if they'll release updated sales figures now, all this time later... I would hope that the overall quality of the game (IMO) would lead to a healthy "tail".

Also Microsoft bought them and it appears that "Avowed" (FPRPG set in Eora) is still being made, so maybe they see potential in the setting - I certainly do...

most places like to keep these numbers close to their chest, unless it's something super huge to brag about. i think our best chance is another steam data leak and then extrapolation based on that

[Boeroer]

Henlo a little quote from Josh Sawyer's tumbler site today:

Much has been said about Deadfire’s lackluster launch, sales-wise, but after about ~18 months, it broke even and by the two year mark, it was pretty profitable (enough that it contributed to employees’ bonuses).

Link: https://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/697035912579891200/hello-i-just-finished-pillars-of-eternity-2-and-i

[xzar_monty]

That's wonderful news!

[kanisatha]

10 hours ago, Boeroer said:

Henlo a little quote from Josh Sawyer's tumbler site today:

 

 

Link: https://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/697035912579891200/hello-i-just-finished-pillars-of-eternity-2-and-i

Very heartwarming to hear. Thanks for sharing. Now I hope someone inside Obsidian, even if not JES himself, will regain the passion for creating a PoE game. With MS money, a lot of the core problems and limitations with PoE2 can very easily be surmounted, providing for a really good game right from the get-go and not two years after launch.

[xzar_monty]

16 hours ago, kanisatha said:

Now I hope someone inside Obsidian, even if not JES himself, will regain the passion for creating a PoE game. With MS money, a lot of the core problems and limitations with PoE2 can very easily be surmounted, providing for a really good game right from the get-go and not two years after launch.

I must say it is particularly heartwarming to see such unfettered idealism during these difficult times.

(I completely agree, btw!)

[Bosmer]

If Josh wants to do a PoE3 we could expect development starting pretty soon, since Pentiment is about to release. However, if Josh doesn't yet feel like working on a deep RPG maybe someone in the current team of Avowed could pick this up. In that case, we would have to wait at least 2-3 years for development on PoE3 to start. In any case, I don't think it's impossible that we'll see our highly anticipated PoE3 one day

Edited October 4, 2022 by Bosmer

[Boeroer]

Fingers crossed!

 

[thelee]

the fact that employees actually got some bonuses out of it hopefully takes some of the sting out of it landing like a wet thud at launch.

it also kinda points to marketing being a major issue - outside of some black swan games like Breath of the Wild or Skyrim, I'm not sure it's very typical for games, even RPGs, to have such long tail of sales. Really seems like people are discovering the game on their own and it's standing up on its own merits in that context.