Marketing cycles have gotten a lot shorter for these reasons. We used to have 2 year long marketing campaigns that are now often as short as 3 months. You do need people to know about your game, and you need them to be ready to buy it as soon as it comes out before the spotlight can be taken by something else. And in order to have reviews drop at the same time, review outlets need lead time ahead of release. Shadow dropping probably isn’t the best answer for most games.

I wasn’t rushing and info dumps weren’t my only criticism. There were some things that I could chalk up to just personal preference like my distaste for almost every character I encountered in the first 5 hours, but when it did decide to start filling me in on how its world works, I found that to be well below the standards of the praise the game gets for its writing. That’s not to say that it’s easy to do it better, but I can point to a number of other works of fiction that show how it can be done. The inner dialogue could have been a great vehicle to do it more elegantly.

It frequently gave too much info all at once about how its world works, yes.

With the praise this game regularly gets, I was unpleasantly surprised to find that the story was inelegantly delivered by info dump.

Fortnite, and it’s not. The store loses them hundreds of millions of dollars per year.

People are sick and tired of expensive garbage games and that shows in the drastic changes in revenue from 2023-2024.

Be careful not to make the data fit your conclusion. Anecdotally, I’ve observed a similar sentiment, but for one thing, AAA releases have slowed down due to long development times, so there just aren’t that many of them in a given year. For another, we know that, by a wide margin, most time spent gaming is only on a handful of mainstay games that first debuted years ago, like Counter-Strike 2, Grand Theft Auto V, Fortnite, Minecraft, etc. Plenty of those aren’t on Steam, but the same concept applies to the games that top the Steam charts.

the vast majority of the money that valve makes comes from indie games, not big studios

This is definitely not the case. Big studios price their games higher and sell more copies. There are only a handful of indie games like Stardew Valley and Terraria that come close to being in the same spot of the bell curve. Most of Valve’s money comes from microtransactions in the longest-running live services and the biggest games of the year.

It was a Titanfall extraction shooter, so not the Titanfall you were looking for.

People wrote in to the Giant Bombcast before to say that they were ordered to destroy code and materials at studios that were going out of business, and they instead hid drives with the files in the drop ceiling on their way out.

Genre wide? I wouldn’t say so.

I haven’t heard of addictive design in the business model of avocado toast.

That’s the analyst prediction, not something that came out of talks behind closed doors.

Yes, they do. I plan on playing some Persona games at some point.

Yes, I have. It was very good, but at times, it was too long for its own good. Keep in mind I haven’t played a Persona game before, but there’s the loop of the calendar system combined with going into a longer dungeon. I know that it being an endurance test and a stress on your resources is a key part of the design, but each of those sections of the game were probably about 10% too long, and then you get to the ending, where the game probably should have ended about 20 hours earlier than it did. There’s something to be said about leaving 'em wanting more, and at the end of the game, it felt like they had long stretched my tolerance for reaching the story’s proper climax, as they kept trying to escalate it in ways that didn’t feel earned.

The UI looked nice, but managing archetypes in particular was split up among three different screens that were very unintuitive. I’d rather they focus on function before form.

There’s definitely a point where a game is too Japanese. Kinitsu Gami didn’t seem to make its money back.

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.