Great so one of the few studios they’ve got that can pump out games really regularly, with polish and humour, they cut.
Instead of investing in expanding them to take the AA+ games Obsidian makes into more the AAA level demanded by Xbox now, even ones in the Fallout universe or similar
I’m with you, but The Outer Worlds 2 and Avowed didn’t sell. They were great games but no one bought them, that’s the problem. I also blame media and people being quiet about them for some reason…
We are in an era where people are in their own bubble and it’s getting harder to reach them.
Yes but nothing Xbox is doing is going to change that - making the games in better known IPs may help a little but they’re also going to be much more expensive to make so will need to sell more.
It felt like the path they were on might eventually get to a place where they were doing well - this path it feels like the big AAA games won’t sell quite as well as Satya demands so Day 1 will be dropped from Game Pass, where they’ll also lose a large number of GP subscribers.
Consoles are going to cost a ton so that market won’t grow and GP was their big differentiator on PC so they’ll struggle even more against Steam.
All the meanwhile they’ve bled many of the “must have exclusives or I’m going to PlayStation” people with only some coming back, if they bleed a chunk of the GP subscribers too then they’re going further in the wrong direction on numbers.
I honestly don’t see how cutting content, cutting devs that could help deliver those big IP games maybe a little quicker and cutting expenditure (they’re going hard on this whole Xbox is a bad investment thing, so clearly there isn’t going to be some big infusion of cash from Microsoft to buy content or marketing or to subsidise the consoles) leads to growth.
Their 1 billion players idea only really works with Minecraft and King and maybe CoD, I fear the rest is expendable in that plan.
Maybe I’m a pessimist right now, but nothing they’re doing screams “the new dawn of Xbox is upon us!”
I agree completely.
They didn’t sell because nowadays’ Obsidian humor, tone or art style don’t resonate with people , Tainted Grail released last year with a smaller budget and less hype and it ended up selling much better than ToW2 or Avowed.
The Companions trailer for Outer Worlds 2 specifically was a terrible attempt to sell their game, i remember skipping it mostly because of it, and revisiting the video yesterday, can’t say i was surprised at every comment being negative/memes.
Hope Sawyer’s game is that game i was expecting from Obsidian back in 2020, even after layoffs the studio is fairly big, but i don’t see any future in Avowed/ToW as IP’s, nor in the actual writing / art style they use for a WRPG