In a candid interview with Jason Schreier of Bloomberg, Feargus Urquhart – the head of Obsidian Entertainment – has discussed the less than great sales of both Avowed and The Outer Worlds 2. In the interview, the studio head commented on the future of both franchises.
Let’s just cut to the important part first, as Schreier closes out his interview by saying Obsidian “…isn’t working on a third Outer Worlds game but does plan to keep making games in the Avowed universe.”
This is something of a surprise as, of the two games, The Outer Worlds 2 reviewed stronger and seemed to do better with fans overall. However, of the two franchises, it’s Avowed that’s moving forward, although it’s clear that Obsidian isn’t saying a third The Outer Worlds title won’t ever happen, even if the series’ future is up in the air.
So, how did we end up here? Well, according to Urquhart, neither game really met expectations, although concrete numbers were not given for either of them.
“They’re not disasters,” Urquhart told Schreier. “I’m not going to say this was a kick in the teeth. It was more like: ‘That sucks. What are we learning?’”
Apparently, what they’ve learned is that they want to reconsider how they make games, as both titles took over 6-years to develop. That’s becoming a pretty common thing in today’s industry, as triple-A dev times seemingly grow longer and longer. And more expensive.
Urquhart wants to bring development time down to 3 or 4 years per title, that way missing sales targets won’t be such a massive blow.
It also transpires that Obsidian didn’t plan on having three games launch in a single year, that’s just how things turned out. It proved to be a problem, because while Microsoft were happily declaring it the “Year of Obsidian”, behind the scenes Obsidian’s support team was struggling to jump from game to game.
“Spacing those releases helps the company manage its resources and not burn everybody out,” Josh Sawyer, Obsidian’s studio design director, told Schreier. “It’s not good to release three games in the same year. It’s the result of things going wrong.”
Avowed is due to land on PlayStation in the coming weeks, a chance to potentially pick up some new sales.
Personally, I found Avowed to be…okay. Nothing special. I might give it another whirl on PlayStation. I enjoyed The Outer Worlds 2 far more and consider it a much stronger game, but Microsoft wounded it before it ever came out by trying to make it their first $80 game before backpedalling. By then, the game’s reputation had already taken a huge hit because people just didn’t consider The Outer Worlds 2 to be worth that kind of money.
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