I’d be willing to give Grounded a try, but last I checked, you can’t host your own server offline, which is my line in the sand. I haven’t gotten around to Pentiment yet, but I just rolled credits on Avowed this afternoon, and it was awesome.
Any given game being more successful does not make Avowed unsuccessful. Grounded has a 33% higher peak and also cost 57% of what Avowed cost for the audience to buy; they may have sold more copies and made less revenue. A more repetitive multiplayer focused game will retain players longer than a single player game with an ending. But ultimately, we have no idea if the game was successful outside of the team saying publicly that they’re happy with its performance. That will never mean raw sales anymore, since they are a part of Game Pass. Game Pass pulls in, in all likelihood, 3-4x Avowed’s budget in revenue every month. Even with the overhead they have of running the service and licensing third party games for it, they can probably afford at least one Avowed on their books every month and justify it as long as they feel like the presence of a flashy new game is what’s keeping people subscribed. No one knows how many people on Game Pass need to play a given game for Microsoft to consider it a success, but perhaps the worst way to evaluate the game’s success is to look at Steam charts and compare it to some other game arbitrarily, much like what’s happening with Assassin’s Creed right now. The Steam forums are full of armchair quarterbacks that are sure that Shadows has flopped by doing the same nonsense comparisons to Steam charts even though this is a series that handily sold tens of millions copies on non-Steam platforms for years.
Mismanagement has and will continue to happen at Microsoft. The first iteration of Avowed was aiming at being “Microsoft’s Elder Scrolls”…but I wouldn’t be surprised if there was no need for that design anymore once they bought Elder Scrolls itself in the next couple of years after that. I’m not too concerned about how long Fable has taken to develop thus far considering when their last Forza Horizon game came out and that full development on Fable probably didn’t start until that game shipped. What I did hear was that when Microsoft originally announced it for 2025, the development team laughed at the idea.
I’m not excusing Avowed for anything, because it’s excellent. BG3 is a better game, true, but it’s a better game than almost every other game ever made too, and it was built reusing a ton of work that the studio had already done over the decade that came before it. There’s a very, very good chance that lots of work on Avowed was done knowing that it would be used in Outer Worlds 2 also, reducing the risk of spending money on both projects. Making great games isn’t a function of how much money was spent on them, or Balatro wouldn’t have been nominated for game of the year. I’m not saying they’re some scrappy indie studio, but it sure seems like they know the answer to the question, “How much money can we spend making this relative to how much money it needs to make?” Spending more money on Avowed wouldn’t have made it more financially successful. It’s why there was that headline about wanting to make a Pillars tactics game and evaluating how big that game could feasibly be for that market. I got more value out of Baldur’s Gate 3, but that doesn’t make Avowed not worth $70 to me.
Good management is getting a working product out the door and keeping your people happy and employed. This game reviewed well; not phenomenally, but well. And Obsidian is spoken of in high regard when it comes to employee satisfaction. All that while getting several other projects moving along too. It’s impressive. And I’m sorry Avowed wasn’t what you wanted to play.
As for Fable, this is a genre that its developer hasn’t built before. Even in a best case scenario, it’s going to take a lot more time for them to build it than it is another racing game. If you want to claim potential mismanagement, it might be the possibility that Microsoft assigned this project to the wrong developer, but we don’t know how this Fable came to be, and maybe they do have the experience to make it work.
It’s a 300 person studio that is basically never all allocated to a single project. That’s extremely efficient with the resources they have. And remember that Outer Worlds 2 has also been in ongoing development for the better part of that same 6 years.
I don’t think they particularly cared if you bought their headset, but they had the premium offering if you were interested. I think they wanted Alyx to be the Mario 64 of VR.
They pivoted after two unsuccessful prototypes, and they’re a multi project studio. In that time frame, they put out Grounded and Pentiment while assisting on State of Decay 3. That’s about as good as management gets.
The failure of a game doesn’t come hand in hand with it being bad. Lots of studios are struggling right now, because there’s just so much out there, and no one wants to compete with GTA.
“Just make good games” doesn’t really work in the age where we’ve got tens of thousands of game releases per year compared to the age of a few hundred games per year.
If you like bigger games, and plenty do, them charging a higher price for it up front makes it more likely that they’re made sustainably. If a game costs $100M to make, the difference between breaking even on $70 versus $60 is hundreds of thousands of additional customers.
Grand Theft Auto V came out 12 years ago and has been in the top ten best sellers almost every single month since then. It’s not manufactured; you’re just very out of the loop. It’s one of the biggest money makers in all of video games. They spent an estimated $2B on GTA6 and will almost certainly make it back within days, not years.
This will probably be the last time it ever happens. They’re trying to get people to double dip, and plenty will, but the console install base isn’t what it was when GTA V came out at the end of a generation. Plus we all know full well that the PC version will happen, whereas in yesteryear, we weren’t sure.
They’d ask $1000 for it if they thought people will pay it. No one at Take Two or Rockstar has said this. Most likely is they’ll do that $100 “advance access” thing that a lot of AAA games like to do, where you get the game a few days early. The business hasn’t gotten in the way of the fun or fairness of the campaign mode for Rockstar’s previous efforts, and if it did this time, we’ll certainly hear about it immediately.