PoE Sales?

[Sven_]

 

Well, PoE´s sales should be 350k units at the moment :

 

http://steamspy.com/app/291650 + GoG + Retail + Rest

 

Maybe they reach 400k by the end of April, but surely not more. Text heavy cRPG´s are much more niche then City managment Games.

 

My prediction after one year : Somewhat between Wasteland 2 and D:OS : 500k - 600k.

 

 

 

Even so, that is a pretty big niche, especially considering that unlike City Skylines PoE has some serious competition -- and multiple studios still doing successfull projects of that scale as well as multiple competition from bigger projects. As outlined above, there are various publishers, some of them spending hundreds of thousands on games each that sell a fraction of these numbers and keep business afloat (the aforementioned publishers specializing on PC adventure games). I think one of the main reasons Obsidian did the Kickstarter was IP ownership. If they had serious trouble getting at least some funding through a traditional model (the original object was 1.1 million dollars), then that was likely because very few, if anyone, had done such games in years before. It's problematic researching a market that at least on initial looks might have disappeared. Or as that Lucas Arts classic had it in 2004, when they hadn't released an adventure game in four years and suddenly axed their Sam & Max sequel reportedly but a couple months from release and in the midst of major gaming outlets doing major press coverage and preview articles: "After careful evaluation of current market place realities and underlying economic considerations, we've decided that this was not the appropriate time to launch a graphic adventure on the PC". The rest was history, or rather Telltale Games.

 

Besides, those are numbers that aren't way off the classic PC RPGs numbers. You're not going to do a Skyrim via this route, obviously. And Electronic Arts won't even consider about opening a Bioware subdivision focusing on doing endless amounts of Baldur's Gate (alongside even more DLC). That is not a criticism, their structuring isn't geared towards that kind of thing. But depending on the project, there are others that would do. Depending on the scale, you don't have to be Skyrim. Or, as Avellone so eloquently put it: "It’s a much reduced amount because you’re not doing all the extraneous features (total voice acting across all languages, the latest super graphic video card enhancements with tint control and crotch rumble™ technology, multiple skews across consoles, etc." There have been various interviews since in which Faergus talked about getting approached by traditional publishers that would like to back that sort of thing and for which it would fit their roster.

 

Naturally a studio of the size of Obsidian, somewhere in between the small houses and the huge dogs on the block, can't live entirelly off of these things. At least they'd do multiple projects like this, and all of them being as successful, likely. If anybody knows London based Sports Interactive, they do specialize on a very PC specific hardcore sports management game that sells a million copies each year (equally not sporting any crotch rumble technology but more numbers juggling than any PC hardcore RPG, which is why they were initially neglected by Electronic Arts though running one of the most succesfull long-term PC franchises by now). But they also have teams who do more streamlined handheld versions of the same thing, and close to 100 full-time employes. Somewhere in between it's similar to something like Total War: doing fine, obviously, but not doing a Skyrim or New Vegas either. Paradox' roster is all about very specialized PC games, and the gaming world would be a much less diverse place without them. By the way, if Steamspy is anywhere near accurate, I find it interesting that more than a third of current Pillars players are from the US. Obviously that is still a large player base in total, but many of the PC exclusive titles traditionally have gone strong in Europe in more recent years, where the PC market is still very strong depending on the region. That is reflected in this statistics, as 50% are said to be from Europe in total, but this doesn't look as clear-cut as I thought it would.

Edited April 15, 2015 by Sven_

[VaultDuke]

I don't think that site that's quote here has reliable numbers. I lists Skyrim as ~ 8 million users, while we know that this number has been the last official one (i.e. more than a year ago, Bethesda announced they had sold more than 20 million copies. compared to the number of retail sales for the consoles (which are not as high a secret as the steam sales of skyrim), this amounted to ~ 8 million copies of Skyrim sold for PC. I doubt, that number hasn't risen since then. somethings off with their way of calculating these. do they even quote sources?

[Archaven]

I think sales figure come from Steam sales. If 350K that's pretty good without any sales. One of the biggest selling point for Cities Skyline was also due to it's affordable selling price. I've played many AAA games and other genres and i'm loving ALOT on PoE.

 

But honestly mostly on the combat. I won't see myself buying Torment Numenera at all. As the best thing i love about PoE is it's combat.

[FlintlockJazz]

Regarding that last bit about sales: one thing to remember is that many of the long-term PC gamers in other countries may use other distribution channels, such as GOG (myself included there) so it depends on national preferences like that.  And of course there is the issue you noted of it depends on the region, so while 90% of Germany (grabbing numbers out of the air here) might be PC gamers their total population is only a fraction of the US and the country next door might be 95% console gamers, whereas you're counting the whole of the US in that there stat.  I know the UK (where I'm from) is mostly console gamer, maybe even more than the US.

Edited April 15, 2015 by FlintlockJazz

[Monte Carlo]

 

 

The paychecks of people we don't know are none of our business.

 

Er, yes it is. The Kickstarter 'making of' doc explicitly features employees discussing the prospect of closing the company if something didn't turn up. They made the commercial realities behind the project part of the story. Not us.

Um, well yeah. Budget, finances are a part of any development story.

 

Individual pay, though? 

 

 

Oh, yeah, I'm with you on that.

[FlintlockJazz]

 

 

 

The paychecks of people we don't know are none of our business.

 

Er, yes it is. The Kickstarter 'making of' doc explicitly features employees discussing the prospect of closing the company if something didn't turn up. They made the commercial realities behind the project part of the story. Not us.

Um, well yeah. Budget, finances are a part of any development story.

 

Individual pay, though? 

 

 

Oh, yeah, I'm with you on that.

 

Did anyone ask for individual pay though?  I closest I found was someone asking for the staff size but I took that to mean how many people worked at Obsidian.

[Monte Carlo]

I didn't think they asked about that either, but TBH I didn't read the whole thread.

[Marceror]

Darn, and here I was hoping to offer the Obsidian team (un)sound tax advice.

[VahnXIII]

Professional salesman here. Do we need to develop more channels to push this? Haha.

[Zoraptor]

Regarding that last bit about sales: one thing to remember is that many of the long-term PC gamers in other countries may use other distribution channels, such as GOG (myself included there) so it depends on national preferences like that. 

 

The only preferences in terms of vendor that really count in this case are GOG and Origin (plus backers), all other versions count as steam 'sales' since they must be registered there. The steamspy data is from general steam (publicly viewable) ownership data so a retail copy or a copy bought at most DD vendors counts towards the steam numbers, as does a steam registered KS copy (though the sales rankings on GOG don't count backer versions, our copies are separate untracked SKUs, hence why backers get PoE marked as unbought at GOG).

 

Steamspy is not itself country biased though purchase preferences and the data it relies on certainly may be- and it does actually provides a by country breakdown of sales too, I believe. Its main source of error is potentially sampling bias; especially if particular groups or nationalities are more likely to make their profiles private so their ownership data is unavailable that may make any extrapolations to overall ownership inaccurate.

 

I could easily believe that, say, Germans or those interested in a relatively niche game are more likely to make their profile private, which would certainly introduce potential systemic undersampling. Then again, Steamspy's data has a pretty large margin of error already, statistically speaking.

[Horrorscope]

 

just compare the Grimrock 1 and Grimrock 2 Sales :

 

http://steamspy.com/app/207170 (Grimock 1 : 871k Sales)

 

http://steamspy.com/app/251730 (Grimrock 2 :90k Sales)

 

And her the Blackguards 1 and 2 Sales :

 

http://steamspy.com/app/249650 (Blackguards 1 : 304k)

 

http://steamspy.com/app/314830 (Blackguards 2 : 9k)

 

It was fun, but dont expect an glorios comeback of the classical cRPG.

 

 

This makes no valid point. You're comparing recently released sequels to games that have cycled through numerous sales and bundles over the last two years. Last month you could pick up Blackguards 1 for something like $5. Both of the games came out well before D:OS and its numbers did business you can't just throw away because they don't match the point you're attempting to poorly make. 

 

 

Revisit it a year from now... these sequels aren't going to approach the original in sales.

[trashmyego]

 

 

Revisit it a year from now... these sequels aren't going to approach the original in sales.

 

 

Revisit it two years from now. D:OS numbers are going to be even better. Pillars of Eternity will be even better. Blackguards isn't a great example because it wasn't a great game. Grimrock 2's numbers will increase, they likely wont match the original, but they don't have to. A majority of the 900k listed likely have never been played, or if they have, maybe once or twice. It's how things work now with steam sales, humble bundles, GOG sales and everything else. A number of people didn't know what they were buying with the original. But when it comes to the numbers D:OS and Pillars have shown as of right now, people knew and wanted what they were purchasing. To say there'll be no future audience is ridiculous. The base will only grow, but to expect it to match up with any triple-a title to justify the continued development is just dumb.

Edited April 15, 2015 by trashmyego

[PIP-Clownboy]

 

And her the Blackguards 1 and 2 Sales :

 

http://steamspy.com/app/249650 (Blackguards 1 : 304k)

 

http://steamspy.com/app/314830 (Blackguards 2 : 9k)

 

It was fun, but dont expect an glorios comeback of the classical cRPG.

 

 

Blackguards 2 was hot garbage - a low effort cash grab. 

 

Your post just proves that well made, polished cRPGs will sell copies. 

[Lychnidos]

 

Paradox said at one month after Cities Skylines came out that it has sold 1 million. Maybe a number for Pillars comes from Paradox after one month aswell? Hope it sells well!

 

Well, PoE´s sales should be 350k units at the moment :

 

http://steamspy.com/app/291650 + GoG + Retail + Rest

 

Maybe they reach 400k by the end of April, but surely not more. Text heavy cRPG´s are much more niche then City managment Games.

 

My prediction after one year : Somewhat between Wasteland 2 and D:OS : 500k - 600k.

 

D:OS is more "mass compatible" because of the goofy and colourfull look. And its 3D. I cant imagine that Pillars will outsale D:OS and i am pretty sure D:OS 2 or Pillars 2 will do alot worse, because the Retro RPG  hype will be over soon (It will end with TON).

 

People want their handholding grind Arenas, dating sims and "social awareness", not deep and compliated cRPG´s, just compare the Grimrock 1 and Grimrock 2 Sales :

 

http://steamspy.com/app/207170 (Grimock 1 : 871k Sales)

 

http://steamspy.com/app/251730 (Grimrock 2 :90k Sales)

 

And her the Blackguards 1 and 2 Sales :

 

http://steamspy.com/app/249650 (Blackguards 1 : 304k)

 

http://steamspy.com/app/314830 (Blackguards 2 : 9k)

 

It was fun, but dont expect an glorios comeback of the classical cRPG.

 

 

Grimrock may have 871k owners, but only 547k (62.84%) have played the game, Blackguards is even worse with 136k (44.74%) players. Compared that with the number of players of D:OS 768k (94.13%), Wasteland 2 367k (90.02%), and PoE 291k (94.67%). Grimrock's and Blackguards' sale numbers seems to include a considerable amount of people that were not really interested in the games, most likely buying them on extreme sales.

Edited April 16, 2015 by Lychnidos

[yaggaz]

The paychecks of people we don't know are none of our business.

~Gasping in horrified shock~ Wh...what? SERIOUSLY!??

[chance]

According to Steamspy, 308K people own the game on Steam, and according to Steam achievements, 16% of owners are backers. So, very very roughly, that looks like about 250K Steam sales.

 

Don't forget those of us like me who bought the game from GoG.com

[demeisen]

According to the SteamSpy data:

 

PoE: 308k,

 

Skyrim: 8,2m.

 

 

 

Some magazines report that Skyrim sales on all platforms have reached 20m.

 

Even assuming PoE should reach 1m after a few years, which I feel is optimistic... something about that ratio is terribly depressing .  It often seems that the worse the game, the better the sales.

[apolloooo]

 

According to the SteamSpy data:

 

PoE: 308k,

 

Skyrim: 8,2m.

 

 

 

Some magazines report that Skyrim sales on all platforms have reached 20m.

 

Even assuming PoE should reach 1m after a few years, which I feel is optimistic... something about that ratio is terribly depressing .  It often seems that the worse the game, the better the sales.

 

probably 20 m across all consoles.

 

also skyrim have alot more budget than PoE and it is watered down, simplified RPG that cater to the less intelligent mass, of course it sells more

[Ink Blot]

probably 20 m across all consoles.

 

also skyrim have alot more budget than PoE and it is watered down, simplified RPG that cater to the less intelligent mass, of course it sells more

 

FFS, does it always have to degenerate to this? I like Skyrim. A lot. For what it is, it's a great game. Doesn't mean I suffer a lower IQ than the rest of humanity. Jeebus.

[barakav]

I don't think that site that's quote here has reliable numbers. I lists Skyrim as ~ 8 million users, while we know that this number has been the last official one (i.e. more than a year ago, Bethesda announced they had sold more than 20 million copies. compared to the number of retail sales for the consoles (which are not as high a secret as the steam sales of skyrim), this amounted to ~ 8 million copies of Skyrim sold for PC. I doubt, that number hasn't risen since then. somethings off with their way of calculating these. do they even quote sources?

It has an algorithm that samples a constant amount of randomly chosen players on steam and might not be able to extrapolate to more than a certain amount 'thanks' to its' limited pool...

 

I think that it should be quite accurate in regards to less popular games.

 

Anyway ,after AJ review the number of concurrent players on steam jumped by around 10000 and the amount of sells this site showed jumped by around 8000 so it is well within the error bars...

 

Paradox said at one month after Cities Skylines came out that it has sold 1 million. Maybe a number for Pillars comes from Paradox after one month aswell? Hope it sells well!

 

Well, PoE´s sales should be 350k units at the moment :

 

http://steamspy.com/app/291650 + GoG + Retail + Rest

 

Maybe they reach 400k by the end of April, but surely not more. Text heavy cRPG´s are much more niche then City managment Games.

 

My prediction after one year : Somewhat between Wasteland 2 and D:OS : 500k - 600k.

 

D:OS is more "mass compatible" because of the goofy and colourfull look. And its 3D. I cant imagine that Pillars will outsale D:OS and i am pretty sure D:OS 2 or Pillars 2 will do alot worse, because the Retro RPG  hype will be over soon (It will end with TON).

 

People want their handholding grind Arenas, dating sims and "social awareness", not deep and compliated cRPG´s, just compare the Grimrock 1 and Grimrock 2 Sales :

 

http://steamspy.com/app/207170 (Grimock 1 : 871k Sales)

 

http://steamspy.com/app/251730 (Grimrock 2 :90k Sales)

 

And her the Blackguards 1 and 2 Sales :

 

http://steamspy.com/app/249650 (Blackguards 1 : 304k)

 

http://steamspy.com/app/314830 (Blackguards 2 : 9k)

 

It was fun, but dont expect an glorios comeback of the classical cRPG.

 

Well ,people buy games in regard to their overall value and hype ,there are also opposite examples ,look at the Divinity series ,the games became progressively better and famous so more gamers bought them. Thanks to the illegal torrent scene players can try games before they buy them and it influences their decisions to buy it.

 

The expansions marketing performance and the amount of copies sold after the first sales ,might give us another estimation of how many players loved this game and how big is its' market.

Edited April 16, 2015 by barakav

[Ouroboros226]

 

According to the SteamSpy data:

 

PoE: 308k,

 

Skyrim: 8,2m.

 

 

 

Some magazines report that Skyrim sales on all platforms have reached 20m.

 

Even assuming PoE should reach 1m after a few years, which I feel is optimistic... something about that ratio is terribly depressing .  It often seems that the worse the game, the better the sales.

 

On the skyrim forums there was a sales prediction thread. I had the highest guess at 12 million copies, a guess I was laughed at for. BUT NOW THEY SEE, THEY ALL SEE! /Gloat

 

The reason I wish a dev would pitch in on this is because I love the game and want it to do well. If a dev could give us a vague answer "less than expected", "average", "good", "very good" that would be great So we know if PoE will see much post-release content or not. 

 

 

[Manart]

To be fair though, Skyrim has been in a few Steam sale already, especially the Winter Madness ones. We just have to wait for the game to be out for like a year or so before we can make an accurate assessment.

[Eurhetemec]

 

According to the SteamSpy data:

 

PoE: 308k,

 

Skyrim: 8,2m.

 

 

 

Some magazines report that Skyrim sales on all platforms have reached 20m.

 

Even assuming PoE should reach 1m after a few years, which I feel is optimistic... something about that ratio is terribly depressing .  It often seems that the worse the game, the better the sales.

 

 

Skyrim is a very good game, and an amazing sandbox CRPG, so that doesn't make sense. It's not a good party-based isometic CRPG (obviously), but that's another story. It's genre/accessibility, not "high quality" that limits sales (quite the contrary - low quality limits sales sharply).

[Rosveen]

 

 

 

probably 20 m across all consoles.

 

also skyrim have alot more budget than PoE and it is watered down, simplified RPG that cater to the less intelligent mass, of course it sells more

 

FFS, does it always have to degenerate to this? I like Skyrim. A lot. For what it is, it's a great game. Doesn't mean I suffer a lower IQ than the rest of humanity. Jeebus.

Yes, this. TES is my favorite game series, I greatly enjoyed Skyrim despite all its flaws, but here I am, backing all these IE-style RPGs and anticipating Tides of Numenera with bated breath. I wonder if it means I have good taste in games or I'm a half-witted console kid. Make up your mind, RPG elitists!

[apolloooo]

that wasn't serious tbh, i'm just exagerrating, cos i enjoyed skyrim too <__<