Right. Like I say, it’s good money for Obsidian, and Paradox is also at a size and, generally speaking, in a part of the market where those are good numbers for them. This will presumably translate into more Obsidian RPGs, and that’s something I am all for. It just doesn’t really say anything about the RPG genre’s profit potential that AAA publishers didn’t already know, and isn’t enough to make them want to spend time and resources on them. Certainly not the sort of core RPG that inXile and Obsidian are putting out with these Kickstarters.

I think thats OK for them. Obsidians a smallish studio, and if 4-5 mil can keep their doors open for a few years, than 9 mil is a damn good deal for them. Plus as an RPG its sales will have a long tail (RPG geeks take a long time to finish a game, so a lot of folks will still have Pillars on their todo list whilst they finish dark souls or whatever). Expect that to double or triple over time.

As far as big publishers like Activision and EA are concerned they might as well be. Let’s assume that that 18.5 million is evenly split between the two. That’s 9.25 million dollars in sales for Pillars of Eternity. A lot of money to you or I, and well into profit territory considering the relatively small budget that game had, for Obsidian. Obviously pretty exciting for Paradox, too. But Activision and EA and their ilk deal in billions of dollars, or at the very least hundreds of millions. 9 million is a drop in the bucket for them.

So yeah. There’s a market for these things. There always has been, and now there’s a way to access it. But that doesn’t mean it’s a market that matters to AAA gaming.

I know all that, it was just a general statement.

Based on the agreement, Paradox can’t influence or control Obsidian’s creative narrative. Since Paradox didn’t actually put up any of the money for the game’s production, just the money need to get the physical goods out and the retailers selling the product. It’s a much more balanced relationship compared to other publisher-developer systems where it is more like a fief or feudal relationship.

The big console slash other publishers just didn’t know how to break into the market. The mass production markets are easier to copy, since somebody else usually occupies the market share. The niche or lower tier marketing categories are hard to muscle in on, since many people don’t even know they exist. It takes specialized knowledge, same thing happened with Anime and probably visual novels from Japan.

It is very difficult for the suits to comprehend that the market does exist, even though there’s no large exploitation of the native resources to account for money in flow and profit production. The people closer to the resource base knows it exists, due to personal experience. Others can only see it abstractly.

As with Diablo and MMO clones, success breeds copycats.

Funny. It's more like Several.Hundred.

If you include new objects, buildings, etc several thousand.

Oh my, this is the understatement of the year. Steam workshop is positively flooded with mods and custom assets.