After launching three games last year, Obsidian vows to never do it again, now that two of them have failed to meet Microsoft’s sales targets.
Obsidian Entertainment had a very busy 2025, launching no less than three games that year: fantasy role-player Avowed in February, the early access version of Grounded 2 in July, and another sizable role-player in The Outer Worlds 2 in October.
Exactly what comes next hasn’t been said yet, but it’s rumoured that the studio is already busy with four projects, one of which is presumably Grounded 2’s full launch.
However, there must be quite a bit of tension within Obsidian right now, as it transpires that of its three 2025 releases, only Grounded 2 is considered a success, with the two big role-playing games not meeting Microsoft’s sales targets.
This comes from a Bloomberg interview with Obsidian head Feargus Urquhart and while he doesn’t share exact figures, he does admit both Avowed and The Outer Worlds 2 underperformed: ‘They’re not disasters. I’m not going to say this was a kick in the teeth. It was more like: ‘That sucks. What are we learning?’’
Microsoft has never shared official sales figures for those games either, but followed Avowed’s launch in February, Bloomberg reported at the time that Microsoft was happy with its performance, which means sales must’ve dropped sharper than the company would’ve liked.
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As for The Outer Worlds 2, it’s been implied by Microsoft to have done poorly since the entire games division underperformed in the months leading up to Christmas.
The first Outer Worlds was a modest hit at four million sales and a critical darling, but perhaps Microsoft, in typical fashion, expected too much from a sequel. Not to mention Avowed and The Outer Worlds 2 would have lost sales from being day one Game Pass additions.
Whatever the case, Obsidian has ruled out an Outer Worlds 3 for the time being, although it has teased more Avowed games. Although whether that means a straight sequel or a return to the more Baldur’s Gate-esque Pillars Of Eternity (which is set in the same universe as Avowed) is unclear.
The studio intends never to release so many games within a single year again, with Urquhart stating that one of their aims is to cut down on development times after The Outer Worlds 2 took six years, partially due to the coronavirus pandemic.
‘Spacing those releases helps the company manage its resources and not burn everybody out,’ adds Josh Sawyer, director on Obsidian’s much smaller Pentiment project, ‘It’s not good to release three games in the same year. It’s the result of things going wrong.’
Given Microsoft’s string of job cuts and game cancellations, it’s understandable to feel nervous about Obsidian’s future, although Urquhart sounds optimistic that the company will still take risks and fund more niche projects like the aforementioned Pentiment, even if ‘maybe where we are going to be from a profitability standpoint isn’t going to be 30%.’
This is a reference to claims that Microsoft is demanding a 30% profit margin on its Xbox division, which is surprising considering the company denied this in a statement to CNBC, calling the figure incorrect.
It’s unclear whether Urquhart was being sarcastic or if it was an unintentional admission that the goal is real within Microsoft.
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