Avoiding the Pillars of Eternity 2 pitfall

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Jul 31, 2018
If you aren’t familiar, Obsidian (popular for games such as Fallout: New Vegas and The Outer Worlds) launched a passion-project Kickstarter years ago for Pillars of Eternity, an isometric RPG in the vein of games like Baldur’s Gate. The Kickstarter raised over $4 million, and held the record for crowdfunded video games, temporarily ;)

The game came out, was relatively well reviewed, and interest in a sequel mounted. Obsidian decided to crowdfund again, but use the new-ish Fig platform.

It was a great success, blowing past stretch goals...


...except, it wasn’t


The director of the game has said the sales were unbelievably low, and even with the Kickstarter/Fig success, the likelihood of a third game is currently next to nil.

There is a chance that Shenmue III falls into the latter category (high crowdfunding, poor sales), but let’s pretend (and hope) that it is more like the former, being a Kickstarter success AND selling well afterwards. Crowdfunding or not, how do you make S4 a success?

I think this is interesting as I believe the two series have many parallels; both are games that are successors (literal sequel or spiritually) to older, niche games with a rabid fan base made by companies/individuals heavily renowned for their older works. We also know that many people supported these Kickstarters to “jump in” and ride the hype that hadn’t necessarily played the previous games/type of game. This is where it gets scary - those same “bandwagon” fans clearly bought PoE 1 in numbers, maybe they missed the Kickstarter, etc., but fell off afterwards and didn’t buy the second. The core fan base was clearly there as the Fig campaign was successful. Shenmue III is already in an odd spot with average review scores and a fan base slightly torn, even if skewing towards the positive. How does IV become successful?

Hope you find this as interesting to think about as I did!
 
I've played a little bit of Pillars of Eternity 1 but nothing of 2. Is the game a direct story sequel, or a "sequel" in the same world with some story references to 1? If it's the latter that might be a key difference between Pillars of Eternity and Shenmue, but I understand your point.

Something to consider is that Divinity: Original Sin 2 came out in 2017 on PC and 2018 on consoles, in-between the releases of PoE 1 and 2. It's another isometric RPG in a similar vein and was very well received with a metacritic around 93 and sales of over a million copies. I imagine that hardcore fans of the genre will buy everything that's considered good, but I wonder if Divinity kind of stole PoE 2's thunder and potential sales?

However, I think the quality of the Pillar of Eternity games isn't really in question. They're well received games with mid to high 80's MC. While I enjoyed Shenmue III, I think if you try look at it honestly it's a bit rough around the edges. Understandable given the circumstances, but a difference in this comparison is we don't know what we're going to get out of Shenmue IV and it has the chance to make a big jump in quality comparatively to PoE 2.

I do understand that III had the initial hype and anticipation that IV probably won't get, but I think to avoid the sales pitfall, the quality of the game needs to improve and it needs a lot of story development (I'm not intending to start this particular discussion again, just going by the consensus). Let's just say for arguments sake it becomes an 80-85 metacritic with a great story. I don't think there will be many fans who where upset with Shenmue III that will pass on Shenmue IV in that case, if IV delivers on what they expected from III.

I imagine a good Shenmue IV can slightly boost sales of the HD Remasters and III, and I also made the argument on one of my posts that if Shenmue IV is announced, Sega should go back and make the "true" remasters that they canceled in favor of the current HD releases. Then they can rely on Shenmue IV to drive sales of S1&2 HD, S1&2 Remastered, and Shenmue III (though obviously I have no idea if Sega gets a cut of S3 sales due to licensing). The main takeaway is there could hopefully be a few more chances to make money outside of direct Shenmue IV sales (this is assuming that PoE 2 is not a direct story sequel in the original argument).
 
A way to make Shenmue more successful is to make the games more action focused. (Since one of the main reasons that GTA was more successful than Shenmue was due to this that the former was far more action focused than Shenmue)

But, I don't think the fans here will like it.
 
It's up to Yu Suzuki's genius and w/e limitation's he's gonna have to face now that he's not obligated to any fan service. Shenmue is in a unique position. It's a one of kind, & still holds true 20+ years later. I'm sure SIV can easily retain those who is soured by S3 if the lore/story is massively expanded. Heck, even just promise a substantial confrontation with Lan di and they will come.

For gameplay sake, I'm hoping the fighting/throws are properly implemented and well executed.
 
I've played a little bit of Pillars of Eternity 1 but nothing of 2. Is the game a direct story sequel, or a "sequel" in the same world with some story references to 1? If it's the latter that might be a key difference between Pillars of Eternity and Shenmue
Interestingly enough, 2 is a direct sequel that takes place right after the ending of 1, and you can even import your save file.
 
You make Shenmue IV a success by making a playable game that doesn't look off-putting to newcomers and still appeals to old-timers. Was The Witcher a huge series until they hit the third game?
 
You make Shenmue IV a success by making a playable game that doesn't look off-putting to newcomers and still appeals to old-timers. Was The Witcher a huge series until they hit the third game?
Nop, I played them at the time (with the witcher 1 collector edition for oc when cds were still a thing) and I only knew 2 other people that knew about it compared on the 3rd one that almost everyone did.

The witcher had the advantage that the story in each game is independent aside of some cameos and such from imported games, a benefit that Shenmue does not have and makes designing a game for newcomers a bit harder in this case.
 
I believe the saving grace of Shenmue is that alot of assets are in place. Shenmue 3 was heavily funded by the fans and the Epic deal limiting the risk of investments. If Shenmue 4 happens it will more than likely be on a fixed limited budget.
 
If Shenmue 4 was being made they would have announced by now.

I doubt we’ll be getting it.
 
If Shenmue 4 was being made they would have announced by now.

I doubt we’ll be getting it.
Sega and Deep Silver are still promoting the series to this day. Shenmue 3 isn’t even out everywhere yet. Not gonna say I’m positive it’s coming, but I wouldn’t call it a day yet either.
 
If Shenmue 4 was being made they would have announced by now.

I doubt we’ll be getting it.
Not a chance, they've got a steam and GOG release coming. It's what 9 months since release originally, sequels can take over 18 months to be announced

Plus they might want to work on something else before Shenmue 4.

Whether it comes or not is up in the air but no earlier than summer 2021 for any announcement IMO.
 
From Cedric Biscay tweet and interview where he speaks about starting development as soon as possible to keep a team together I'm 100% certain Shenmue 4 will happen. At the same time I believe if Shenmue 4 does check off the right boxes we won't be getting a Shenmue 5.
 
Thanks for giving me another terrible, somewhat plausible scenario to consider, along with the Beirut explosion and "omniviolence," OP.
 
Thanks for giving me another terrible, somewhat plausible scenario to consider, along with the Beirut explosion and "omniviolence," OP.
I certainly don’t mean to spread more negativity for the sake of it. I hope we get S4 as much as everyone else.
 
I certainly don’t mean to spread more negativity for the sake of it. I hope we get S4 as much as everyone else.
No, you're good. I'm just messing. It is still a kind of scary thought, that seems entirely too possible, though.
 
I don’t think the future of PoE is as bleak as the linked articles make out.

Whilst initial sales were far below expectations, that Microsoft opted to continue ahead with plans for console ports after acquiring Obsidian (the Xbone and PS4 versions launched at the beginning of this year and the switch port is still planned for a later date) suggests that they still think there’s a chance that they can turn things around.

Steam Spy estimates suggest that the PC version of the game went on to sell more than the 580,000 copies needed to turn a profit (their figure is between 500k and 1m copies sold - although these obviously wont all have been at the $50 price point) and although there doesn’t seem to be much info regarding the sales performance of the console versions, it seems likely that the game recovered from the initial poor sales and ended up turning a modest profit.

This could be seen as a sign of hope for Shenmue 3 and the chances of a fourth game, but I think it also highlights just how many sales are needed for a game to be a commercial success.

PoE 2 seems to have had a budget of around $5m and required just shy of 600k sales to break even, which would suggest that Shenmue 3 would have needed around 2 and a half million sales to recoup its $20m budget - a monstrous figure considering that most people here seemed to agree that 500,000 copies would have represented a successful return before launch.

Sure, a lot of Shenmue’s budget was offset by crowdfunding (around $7m) and the Epic exclusivity deal (unknown, but potentially more than $10m if other exclusivity deals are anything to go by), but for a publisher considering whether or not a fourth Shenmue game is worth a punt, these things likely won’t be present to help subsidize development costs (to be fair, they could go down these avenues again to some degree, but I don’t think they’d raise anywhere near as much through crowd-funding nor do I think Epic would be willing to offer as much as they did for Shenmue 3 exclusivity).
 
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