PoE sells 500K units

[Sedrefilos]

Mega dungeon was one of the best features of the game. I liked it was linked with the stronghold. Although, since it's already been done, maybe I'd like to see something else in the sequel. Say 2 mega dungeons about the 2/3 of Endless paths each, with different storylines; if they could be linked with the main plot (one of them at least) I'd like it even more

[Achilles]

I think one mega-dungeon per game is sufficient. My only complaints were that the resting bonuses sucked (fixed) and that random events are too random (625 hours - something has come up from od nua to attack precisely twice, yet my character always comments as though this has been a constant thorn in his side since taking over. And don't plan a build around any of Azzuro's items). Looking forward to seeing what happens in 3.0

[Tigranes]

I hope they don't use crowdfunding, but 500k sales doesn't mean 20m for the company, not even close. 

[Fenixp]

Pretty much, Steam/GOG/Origin? takes cuts, presumably Paradox will take a percentage and most people buy games when they're on sale

[Zenbane]

I'm pretty sure a single player RPG is more about a personal goal and contribution, as opposed to financial success. If someone wants to focus heavily on money in gaming, then a phone app is where ya wanna go. Anyone here see how much Candy Crush sold for this year? It's in the Billions lol

[Rosveen]

We aren't talking about a bunch of guys in a basement making a game in their free time. We're talking about professionals who develop games for a living. Money is always one of primary concerns. You don't make a profit, you go out of business. Your profits aren't high enough, you have to cut corners in your next project.

[aluminiumtrioxid]

Criticism is good and healthy and drives the free market. However, fact that this forum does not ban creators of unnecessary noise pollution might be the reason that the game developers spend more time in open discussion on other forums. Food for thought.

 

I believe a dev flat-out said something to that effect.

Edited November 26, 2015 by aluminiumtrioxid

[Quillon]

Congrats!

 

https://twitter.com/Obsidian/status/669937543425585152

[Zenbane]

hell yeah! well deserved

[Zoraptor]

 

Now, back on topic? POE2 is probably 99% sure of getting made, all things considered. Hopefully it can afford to have a bigger team and budget, and a considered effort on improving every aspect.

 

I don't think POE2 being made was ever a question, I'm just wondering will it be via KS or did they make enough money for a sequel.

 

 

Unless KS (or equivalent) has been too much of a pain in the arse it makes a very useful pre-order system, less cut taken, no need to have Paradox publishing at the start, built in and sustained early publicity etc. I'm not entirely sure they've found the overall 'kickstarter experience' to be worth those advantages though, at least for a sequel.

[Flouride]

I hope they don't use crowdfunding, but 500k sales doesn't mean 20m for the company, not even close. 

 

I would say they've made like 10+ millions on top of what they got from the KS and considering the budget of the game that's fantastic. And every month they keep selling more, so I think it's safe to say they will make about 15 million dollars with the game eventually.

[wanderon]

Obsidian is making money from the game? I thought it was just part of their community service requirement. 

[Sedrefilos]

The point is the game sold and continues to sell very good, giving Obs enough money to make a double-size budget game as a sequal if they want to. Unless they intend to go full 3D open world style, I don't see why they'll need kickstarter to make the sequel, unless, of course, they're of the "geeks will pay for anything" abusive mentality, that I really hope they are not.

Or unless 500K+ copies is not good sales and we're assuming otherwise because we don't know everything that is going on behind the scenes (debts, contracts with publishers/liscences etc).

Edited November 27, 2015 by Sedrefilos

[rheingold]

I like kickstarter - I think it has some real advantages for devs. First, it acts as a gauge for how much interest there is in a game. Secondly the money coming in takes some heat off the devs. While it is true that the industry works on risk, I still think just about everyone responds better with the pressure somewhat muted.

My main gripe with it though, are the damnable stretch goals. I'd rather they used the resources to work on the game rather than extend it just for the sake of it.

I'm ok with the stronghold, and the endless paths are fine. But nothing spectacular, and I reckon if they had been able to use the resources for the dungeon on the story, the game would have been tighter.

Edited November 27, 2015 by rheingold

[Fenixp]

Might be tighter, but wouldn't necessarily be better. RPGs are largely defined by the amount of choice they give players to realize their characters. Endless Paths added options which would be impossible to incorporate into the main game without Endless Paths. That's why stronghold is a bit of a failure - the only real option it currently offers to the player is whether he'll build everything or not, which is not much of an option. By expanding the main storyline and the main game, player would be just given more of the same. I consider Endless Paths an essential part of experience gained from Pillars.

 

That being said, Obsidian could have added Endless Paths even without it being a stretch goal and nobody would really bat an eyelash over them doing so, optional long dungeons are not really a rare sight in RPGs of old, and generally speaking - yeah, for stretch goals to work, they need to be on the drawing board for the project since day one, and they need to be carefully considered when development team considers budget for the title as opposed to being semi-random things you throw on top of your KS to get more money.

 

Either way, if Obsidian creates another KS for second Pillars, I'll gladly be one of them abused geeks who pay for anything.

[Karkarov]

If someone wants to focus heavily on money in gaming, then a phone app is where ya wanna go. Anyone here see how much Candy Crush sold for this year? It's in the Billions lol

So much this.  Phone games are a MASSIVE scam and casual gamers eat them up.  You can make more money with one phone game that does 10% of the money Candy Crush does than Activision will with Black Ops 3.  Not even joking.  Just to give you an idea how pervasive that game is it has over 100 million downloads on Android alone.  Imagine if you only had 20 million downloads and only 10 percent of your players spent money and they only spent 1 dollar per player per week.  Think about it.

 

In other news I see no reason Obsidian should not use Kickstarter.  It isn't a question of needing KS to fund it, who cares if you do or don't?  It is guaranteed pre orders, it builds hype for your game, and it gives you an instant influx of cash for development.  Do you honestly think Larian Studio's needed KS money for Divinity Original Sin or the sequel?  It is icing on the cake, or in old wise man speak...  One in hand is better than two in the bush.  KS is guaranteed money in hand, right here, right now, and it is very hard to beat that.

[Fenixp]

If making money on mobile would be as easy as you and Zenbane describe it, you'd see every bigger company turn to it. But it's really not. Currently, phone market is saturated, and it requires massive amounts of marketing, branding, luck and very specific kind of gameplay (contrary to popular belief, crafting F2P phone games in such a way that they maximize profits is not that simple) to succeed. What you describe is the ideal scenario, but penetrating that particular market is night impossible and investing into mobile games is quite risky.

 

What Obsidian went for was a more or less certain success - they started off with a KS campaign which showed them great interest in this kind of game and then they crafted the game as well as they could (and they're Obsidian, so sure it'll be good). With their background, experience and ability, if Obsidian wanted to make money and secure their future, I don't believe what they did is a bad way about it.

Edited November 27, 2015 by Fenixp

[AndreaColombo]

But this project alone was/is too small to sustain a company like Obsidian, and IIRC Feargus said so explicitly in interviews.

 

Of course more ambitious, money-grubbing projects would have probably been unfit for a KS campaign, so it was a matter of balancing the company's needs, the game they wished to work on, and the means they had chosen for financing.

[Fenixp]

Sure, but now they're working on a board game, apparently there are talks about TBS and then there's the second game. I don't think they want to be stagnant.

[Zenbane]

If making money on mobile would be as easy as you and Zenbane describe it, you'd see every bigger company turn to it. But it's really not.

 

No one either stated nor suggested that it was "easy," learn to read.

 

Nothing in life worth doing is easy, and hard work helps define achievement. However, knowing your target goals and which market yields the best reward for those goals is a key to success; where "success" is whatever you define it to be. In this case, if OBS primary goals were to re-invigorate the RTwP single-player RPG genre in an award winning way that also used crowd-funding... then they succeeded. If, however, OBS decides that all that jazz is secondary to financial success, then perhaps a different market is more ideal: like phone app's or  a free-to-play MMORPG with in-game purchases. Keep in mind that this is just a sidebar discussion taking place because the main topic of "over 500k units sold" turned in to a discussion about ongoing financial success

Edited November 27, 2015 by Zenbane

[Cantousent]

Yeah, that's thread evolution for ya!  hehe  ...But I think Obsidz likes making the type of games they make and there's probably not as much risk in simply sticking with what they know.  On the other hand, they are making the upcoming Pathfinder Card game for the tablet and I'm really looking forward to it.  In fact, while I've been toying with purchasing a tablet for a long time, I'm finally going to purchase one for, of all things, a game.  lol  They really should be advertising their Pathfinder card game more:  http://forums.obsidian.net/forum/98-pathfinder-adventure-card-game/

[Zenbane]

aahh! So they are making both a mobile App game and a free-to-play MMORPG with in-game purchases:

https://aw.my.com/us/news/general/gold-and-premium-account-coming-armored-warfare

 

Good! Now that we know how daddy is paying the bills, bring on the PoE updates 

Edited November 27, 2015 by Zenbane

[Karkarov]

If making money on mobile would be as easy as you and Zenbane describe it, you'd see every bigger company turn to it. But it's really not.

It is actually fairly easy to make a mobile game for less than the cost of anything resembling what you or I probably think of when someone says "video game".  It is hard to get the kind of success Candy Crush has, but it isn't "that hard".  Candy Crush for example didn't have any advertising or tv spots when it started, it just got lucky, all the advertising and budgeting you are talking about came after the game had already made millions.

 

There is a reason many formerly huge game developers like Konami are now switching almost exclusively to a mobile/casual market.  I also hate to say it but I bet Square Enix's mobile offerings make them more money than their actual console releases do.  So yes, you are right, it isn't "easy" to get massive success in mobile.  But it does cost a lot less to make a mobile game and go with the "throw crap at the wall and see what sticks" approach than the 50-100 million dollar investment "Gee I hope this game sells massive or we are F'd" style of many titles over the last few years.

 

 

Edited November 27, 2015 by Karkarov

[Fenixp]

I'm actually quite interested in seeing how will Konami fare on mobile market, personally I think it was a bit of a stupid move, but what do I know. Anyway, one of the reasons why I'm a big fan of small, independent projects is precisely because they don't require the ridiculous budgets big projects do - the amount of cash flowing there is absurd. Obsidian absolutely seems to go the right way, their independent project was a success, they're branching out, I think it's by far the safest approach for a company like them. Even ****e on mobile requires skill to create in order to milk a good deal of money out of people, just lucking out with a single 10 cent app won't cut it for a studio like Obsidian.

Edited November 28, 2015 by Fenixp

[Oralaina]

Interesting discussion.  Bottom line for me:  most companies are NOT making games I want to play.  I detest phones of any sort, and I wouldn't play a game on a phone to save my sanity (yeah, I'd rather go round the bend than mess with that sort of crap on a phone) - however, it's obvious that I'm about 4 generations out of date....

 

Then there's the issue with not having unlimited bandwidth.  All I hope is I can keep finding games to have fun with that I can play on my desktop AND for which I can afford the download bandwidth.  I figure I have 30 to 40 more years of life, so all of the above may not even come close to happening.... And if that's the case, well, I guess I'll still be playing Skyrim, POE etc. assuming computers down the road will run them....

 

[And hey guys - be nice to each other okay?  Otherwise Cant will whack y'all and I do enjoy reading what you post!]

Edited November 27, 2015 by Oralaina