I do think it’s reasonable to assume that STALKER 2 sold, in all likelihood, far more copies than Avowed. But for anything other than multiplayer games that rely on retention and monopolizing all of your time, I’d say Steam charts are a bad way to try to get an apples to apples comparison. Number of reviews has been the metric that I always hear devs using as a point of comparison. It still won’t be a very accurate picture of how many copies it sold until you get far enough out that enough of the game’s players have had time to finish the game, since that’s when they’re most likely to leave a review, but while I doubt Avowed’s <7k reviews will catch up to STALKER 2’s 82k by June, it doesn’t mean Avowed is unsuccessful just because STALKER 2 was more successful.

It’s not a good unit of measurement to determine if the game was successful. Longer games will have higher concurrent players, pound for pound, just because those people are kept online longer. Its success would be determined by copies sold, not concurrent users. Elden Ring did not only sell half as many copies as Black Myth: Wukong, but it had half the concurrent players on Steam.

Game Pass is not captured publicly for Avowed or STALKER 2, and it’s possible that people were more aware of one’s presence on the store than the other, or that they were more confident that they knew what STALKER 2 was than that they knew what Avowed was, and so would be more interested in checking it out on Game Pass. With publicly available information, we can’t determine what Avowed needs to be successful. I can guesstimate that it sold about 368k copies (55 x 6700 reviews) at $70 a piece (it has a higher tiered $90 version that people bought too, but then you get into muddy waters with currency conversions from non-US territories, which is more complicated than I know how to estimate), which would mean it brought in over $25M, before Steam’s cut, in two weeks. I can also guesstimate that the game cost them less than $70M to make, which it doesn’t strictly need to make back in sales (though it very well may over its long tail), because this is a Microsoft-owned game that’s available on Game Pass, the way that Microsoft would very much prefer you to play their games.

That $70M that I just made up as a sort of educated guess could have easily had its development budget spread across The Outer Worlds 2 or even Grounded, reducing the overall cost of all of those games by sharing tech and developers in such a way that they’re getting more mileage out of each dollar spent. Plus, if they decide to make Pillars of Eternity III, they’ve now got a bunch of assets already built that could be reused yet again. Obsidian’s status as a multi project studio is sadly an oddball in the industry at this level of production value, which is a damn shame, but it’s more sustainable for all sorts of reasons, to the point that even if this project is a failure, it could be kept afloat by the other irons they have in the fire.

tl;dr All that to say that Steam charts are data that are good for some things but are bad at measuring this game’s success.

“Anyone who enjoyed past Obsidian games is overwhelmingly disappointed” just isn’t true, so don’t speak for others.

Hi-Fi Rush was $30 and Hellblade II was $50. I don’t know how they determine what each game ought to be worth, because Hi-Fi Rush was too low at $30, and Redfall was too high at $70.

It “reached” almost 5 million players. They do not break down how many of those are purchased copies versus Game Pass subscribers. Here’s a handy trick that I’ve heard from devs though: your range for how many people purchased the game is somewhere between 20x and 70x the number of reviews it has. Most end up around 55; for the biggest successes like Elden Ring, it ends up being closer to 20. So about 363k copies sold on Steam, probably; reviews tend to come after someone’s done playing a game, after all.

I’ve played most of Obsidian’s catalog at this point, and this game rules.

Which part of “concurrent players on Steam” makes it a metric that determines if the game was a success?

The review period is typically pre-launch. In a perfect world, the benefit there is that reviewers aren’t all rushing to get their review done first, and publishers get to have good review scores correspond with the launch of the game, right when interest in buying it is at its peak. But in this case, they can review the game before the release date, praise it, and then Capcom can sneak in a patch on day 1 of its real release that adds in microtransactions like these that might sink the score if they were there for the reviewers.

Often times, including this time for sure, changes like this are made after the review period specifically so that they’ll fly under the radar from press. But also, they may just be informing their readers who didn’t know the last several times Capcom has done this.

Basically the entire staff of Annapurna interactive walked out and left the company. The company still exists, but developers are no longer working with the same publisher anymore really, and some deals got axed.

I still have yet to play a 3e game in video game or tabletop, but yes, I figured PoE got most of its ideas from 3e. Here’s where we get down more to personal preferences, but I really prefer a flatter leveling structure for all sorts of reasons, and even though 3-5% per level doesn’t sound like much, it super is, lol. Like, it makes you get hit significantly less and land hits significantly more, and you get that every level. 5e speaks more to my preferences in that way, though it too isn’t perfect, of course.

PoE2 definitely learned to steer away from those minor bonuses as level up rewards, because it had since been heavily studied what people like and do not like in certain leveling systems and why, and those minor damage upgrades were at the top of the list. Anything combat related during level ups were changed to skills, and I thought the passive bonus selections felt meaningful.

Give a quick search for Annapurna games division, and they may have cut ties for completely unrelated reasons to the game’s success.

The 3% more damage and 3% better defense happens every level, and even though that was toned down from PoE1, it still means that each level scales way harder than 5e, like proficiency bonuses on crack. Per-encounter design is good on paper, but then you can end up weirdly splitting some fights into multiple encounters so you have all of your spells refreshed for a couple of enemies, which is odd in its own way. From the first 5 hours with Avowed so far, I think they found an interesting balance on resting and consumables, which could still stand to be tweaked further but solves some of those per-encounter problems.

Or maybe he (you said John, but did you mean Josh?) doesn’t acknowledge it because, like me and those I’ve talked to, he considers it to be a non-factor; and there’s a very good reason to change your setting up for the sequel so that it doesn’t feel like you’ve already played that game. The lore already had these regions baked into them, and it still fits the definition of high fantasy even if it’s also in a pirate setting.

Larian had zero reason to change a winning formula so I’m not sure why that factors in your mind?

Because Baldur’s Gate has historically been RtwP, so deciding that the third one didn’t need to be is a good indication of which way the wind is blowing with regards to those designs. Pillars of Eternity was, of course, pitched as an unofficial continuation of Baldur’s Gate’s legacy before BG3 happened, which is why the marketing copy for it says things like “gather your party” and “venture forth”. I haven’t played the recent Pathfinder games, but I understand they came to the same conclusion that Obsidian did by adding turn-based after the fact.

I’m not doubting that the setting affected your choice, but at large, I’m not convinced it was a significant factor in the game’s success.

Which of those issues you criticised are highlighted in the game trailers and ads that were run?

The stronghold, at the very least. It was a major problem in the first game to have your base of operations be a thing that you had to return to with travel time, so it’s a significant course correction to have it come with you.

It’s way too reductive to say that people bought this one or not based on trailers and impressions. That’s absolutely a part of it, but everyone I spoke to, admittedly a small sample size, who played the first game and not the second, even people who really liked that first game, was because that first game is such an endurance test. There’s little else besides combat, and there’s so much of it. Eventually it leads to decision fatigue. Even the people who really wanted to play the second game were daunted by having to start it, and they felt that they needed a breather before starting it, which in most cases led to them not getting around to it.

It’s also quite likely that people just don’t want more RtwP. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that PoE2 got that turn-based mode post-release, or that the Torment follow-up went turn-based, or that Larian ultimately stuck to turn-based for BG3 after their previous two games were turn-based. RtwP is why it took me so long to get around to playing either PoE game.

Speaking of BG3, and unintentionally sticking with the Deadfire theme, a rising tide lifts all boats, and that game made people hungry for more. I disagree with Sawyer that the difference between PoE and BG3 is simply “budget”, but I do think there’s reason for Microsoft to want “one of those”, if they’re so inclined, and it’s now been made cheaper to produce since Avowed exists and can be iterated upon.

If I can’t host the server myself, it’s still too expensive. What a shame this game turned out to be, man.

That’s a weird read on it. It’s more like, “how big could we feasibly make that game when it needs to sell enough copies to keep our people employed?”

But that’s not really “their audience”; that’s you. PoE2 actively addressed every criticism I had from the first game, and it’s one of the best RPGs I’ve played. They even added a turn based mode that you would think would be phoned in because the game wasn’t initially designed for it, but they knocked that out of the park too.

I remember having a similar feeling just from the demo for the game, probably about 10 years after its release. Perhaps it just didn’t age well.

For the longest time, they couldn’t undercut physical MSRP with digital MSRP because they didn’t want to upset Walmart and have them stop stocking their wares.