Was Pillars of Eternity a success, a failure, or a flop?

[Zoraptor]

 

 

Hmmm...that's interesting as at the beginning of D:OS the number of Kickstarter Backers is presented in big, bold, lettering...21,040, is the number Larian states in the game itself...

 

You also don't seem to be aware that Obsidian puts the number of Kickstarter backers for PoE @ 77,000 +...again, in the game itself...

 

...Which leads me to believe you have neither game else you would surely know these things...

 

Hint: in the future it might be wise to consider "Steamspy" a questionable source at best...

 

 

While steamspy isn't 100% accurate, it is a close approximation.  As a game developer, I can confirm that the numbers on steamspy for our game is very close to the numbers that were sold on steam.

 

 

Well, are you saying that he didn't get his "kickstarter backer" numbers from Steamspy after all, then?  I mean they are obviously wrong as the numbers presented by the game devs themselves in the actual games are, of course, unimpeachable. 

 

 

If I had to guess the 80k for DivOS could come from early access + kickstarter, ie people who owned the game before its 'official' release. Of course, I'm not up to date on whether that is publicly queryable data, I'd assume so for a public profile but I don't use steam so can't really check. Easy for someone else to though, if a game has a 'purchased on' date visible it would be trivial to get early access sales numbers.

 

In any case Steamspy ought to be pretty accurate in most cases, statistically speaking it's doing the same thing as political opinion polling. Its inaccuracies will be the intrinsic sampling error all polling has, which is why some sales figures seem to go down sometimes; and whether there is a fundamental systemic bias in profile availability, ie it can only poll public profiles, not private ones. If there is a substantive number of private profiles and a significant difference between what they vs what public ones own then you get inaccurate estimates, not really anything that can be done to fix that sort of error either.

Edited June 21, 2015 by Zoraptor

[Nakia]

To me this all moot.  Early in 2012 Obsidian was in serious trouble.  They had to lay people off.  They came up with the idea of doing the Kickstarter.  It was successful.  Obsidian now has its own game and a possible franchise .  They are back in business.  That to me is success.  

[Tuckey]

I'm glad that the genre itself (isometric crpgs) is broader than Pillars. I worried irrationally that the game might kill off similar rpgs in the future. At least we don't have all our eggs in one

 

basket hoping that this project is successful enough (Divinity original sin and Wasteland 2), even if I'm disappointed by Pillars overall it has some good parts.