Eurogamer never fails to praise meh games because the editorial is friends with some of the older staff at the developer. Jesus. Modest ambition. Avowed was supposed to improve upon Outer worlds and the like, instead, it’s shallower and with more broken systems like itemisation.
I’m just tired of the genre. I have played Morrowind, and Oblivion, and Skyrim, and Fallout 3, and New Vegas, and Fallout 4, and Fallout 76, and Outer Worlds, and Cyberpunk, and Starfield. I’m good.
Give me more Hi-Fi Rush. Give me more Atlas: Reign of Sand. Give me more Eternal Strands.
Lol, no, the answer is they will make cuts to Obsidian.
I’d normally say this is crazy talk given that Avowed is almost certainly profitable, but they did decide they wanted nothing to do with Tango Gameworks after making Hi-Fi Rush, so it wouldn’t be beyond them to do something this stupid. To Obsidian’s credit, they’ve got a bunch of irons in the fire at any given time, basically everything they make reviews well, and they don’t overscope their projects to the point that they need to sell 3 million copies to break even, so even if they’re small potatoes on a spreadsheet, they still ought to always look good on a spreadsheet. I hear Obsidian ranks highly in “best places to work” polls too.
The problem is that even when a studio publishes a successful game which brings in sales over many months, you can still generally reduce short-term costs by firing those devs. And investors love short-term profits.
And, optimistically, I think there’s less chance of that happening for Obsidian just due to how many other projects they have going on at once. Then you’re constantly rolling people off of one project and onto another rather than having too many people of one discipline that you don’t need at the beginning of a new project in a single-project studio. In the last 10 years, Obsidian’s got 11 games to its name, so it’s not like they’re taking 7 years to put a game out and hoping it does well enough to justify the next 7 years.
Yeah, fair point. It doesn’t make it impossible for a manager to decide to downsize the studio after a launch, but at the very least, you won’t draw as much attention to that being an option, when you don’t need to pitch a new project while you’re about to run out of things to do.
I have nothing to corroborate this other than my intuition, but I’d bet the outcry against Microsoft in the wake of them shuttering Tango will make them far more hesitant to do something similar in the future. They have done a lot of work to move away from the GFWL era and have clawed just a little bit of goodwill back which does a lot to sell games, and the Tango closure was clearly an own goal that really hurt their image.
