Microsoft bought Obsidian

[HeLLfire]

So, guess how many years they have left now?
Personally i'll guess 3-5 years on the top of my hat.

This is just the cynic in me, but buyouts often start to wreck (change) companies no matter what has been said and orally "promised". There's always some "business reason".

Unless they have stuff in a contract confirm those points, that MS doesn't want to, and won't change the way they make games is IMHO naive.

I'm guessing it will take about year for the parent company to start changing things to their detriment and, from there on it's all down hill.

[Qiox]

Obsidian did this to themselves. It was either sell the company or close down. They had no other options.

POE2 is a monumental flop selling 20% of the number of copies needed to break even. (as of end of September) It has no chance of actually reaching the break even point, causing the inventors who funded the game (Kickstarter money was a small part of the total money spent) to lose most of what they invested.

They had no money to use to go forward with any other projects.

[HeLLfire]

My post is just opinion, but your post seem to state facts.
Do you have any sources on that?

All i found that seemed legit was one guy (private investor) here:
https://www.gamezone.com/news/investor-says-obsidians-pillars-of-eternity-2-flopped-big-time/
And tons of forum posts claiming x y z but no real hard source.

[Johnny Casey]

Good riddance I say.

[D'amarr from Darshiva]

There are several current topics about this in Steam's PoE 2 forum.

One can speculate all day, but such an aquisition can also lead to good things - possibly moving away from Unity engine and iso-metric view.

[GamerWolfOps]

引用自 D'amarr from Darshiva：

There are several current topics about this in Steam's PoE 2 forum.

One can speculate all day, but such an aquisition can also lead to good things - possibly moving away from Unity engine and iso-metric view.

"but such an aquisition can also lead to good things "
Not Really.

https://ca.ign.com/articles/2018/06/11/e3-2018-heres-what-happened-to-every-studio-microsoft-has-bought

"There’s no clear fate outlined for Microsoft’s latest game-studio shopping trip. Will these newly bought developers disintegrate after pumping out one popular sequel too many? Will they vanish into the broader mass of Microsoft Game Studios? Or will they strike out on their own in a few years? As with any large company that buys a smaller one, history makes one thing clear: there’s no guaranteed success.

Of the 10 studios we profiled that Microsoft has acquired over the past 20 years, five have been closed, two are still around but separated, and three are still active members of the Microsoft family. This isn’t to speculate on the fates of Ninja Theory, Playground Games, Compulsion, or Undead Labs -- the Xbox division of the past few years under the leadership of Phil Spencer is night-and-day different than the Xbox of the 360 era."

Gamers/RPG fans should be very very worried of the future for the state of Western made RPG games.

Oh and Minecraft now is nothing then a joke now. Its not the same title as it once was.

[GamerWolfOps]

I dont see Obsidian surviving as game studio under Microsoft for very long. Since they were bought by the greedy $$$ Microsoft.

They will no longer reply or respond to any fans on their fourms and vice versa. That is the bad part about all this.

A great exmaple of this is how they screwed up age of empires definitive edition.

[D'amarr from Darshiva]

引用自 GamerWolfOps：

"but such an aquisition can also lead to good things "
Not Really.

Really. It is consolidation, and it is a natural process. How many of the studios in that article you've linked would have survived, if they had not been bought by Microsoft? Game companies file for chapter 11 bankruptcy regularly. To close a company after it has been bought does not imply that all if any of its employees will lose their jobs. Also keep in mind the usual fluctuation. A company's name can stay unchanged for many years, but essential developers may have been replaced a long time ago.

I would prefer some of the key developers behind PoE to make the jump to full 3D and transfer their world building efforts to superior game technology, particularly since they've constructed areas in 3D already anyway. The graphics in PoE are great compared with Baldur's Gate/Icewind Dale, but this is not the end of the road. 2D graphics with isometric view is a dying model, however.

There are also different teams at Obsidian. Those that developed Tyranny have come up with rules I didn't like so much. If an aquisition of Obsidian means that talents found in that company will get a chance to work on even better games, so be it. The only alternative would be for talented/capable individuals to apply for a job somewhere else.

[Leonhast]

I backed POE on Kickstarter ... in my opinion it was a nice game, but not what I had hoped for.
I bought Tyranny ... again in my opinion an ok game, but nothing outstanding.
Fallout Vegas is the last game by Obsidian that I remember being really good (but it was cut and had a number of bugs).
I often felt that it was a problem of aquiring the necessary funding to make the game they can and want to make. If Microsoft helps in that aspect, maybe it can work.
But Microsoft wants money back, probably applying pressure (release soon) and closing a studio if returns are too low.
If Obsidian vanishes (based on its current state and the games it lately produced) - it's a loss, but not an immense one (to me).

[Boneyard Bob]

引用自 Leonhast：

If Obsidian vanishes (based on its current state and the games it lately produced) - it's a loss, but not an immense one (to me).

And it's not like the talent get's butchered when a studio dissolves. They'll migrate to other gaming pastures.

[happybjorn]

Yeah, some random guy's tweets with cherry picked data and obvious bias are news. Go gaming journalism.