not sure if the question is serious but anyway: stalker 2 was also on gamepass and had 120k concurrent users on steam while avowed had 20k.

It's not a good unit of measurement to determine if the game was successful. Longer games will have higher concurrent players, pound for pound, just because those people are kept online longer. Its success would be determined by copies sold, not concurrent users. Elden Ring sold at least twice as many copies as Black Myth: Wukong, but it had half the concurrent players on Steam. Game Pass is not captured publicly for Avowed or STALKER 2, and it's possible that people were more aware of one's presence on the store than the other, or that they were more confident that they knew what STALKER 2 was than that they knew what Avowed was, and so would be more interested in checking it out on Game Pass. With publicly available information, we can't determine what Avowed needs to be successful. I can guesstimate that it sold about 368k copies (55 x 6700 reviews) at $70 a piece, which would mean it brought in over $25M, before Steam's cut, in two weeks. I can also guesstimate that the game cost them less than $70M to make, which it doesn't strictly need to make back in sales (though it very well may over its long tail), because this is a Microsoft-owned game that's available on Game Pass, the way that Microsoft would very much prefer you to play their games. That $70M that I just made up as a sort of educated guess could have easily had its development budget spread across The Outer Worlds 2 or even Grounded, reducing the overall cost of all of those games by sharing tech and developers in such a way that they're getting more mileage out of each dollar spent. Plus, if they decide to make Pillars of Eternity III, they've now got a bunch of assets already built that could be reused yet again. Obsidian's status as a multi project studio is sadly an oddball in the industry at this level of production value, which is a damn shame, but it's more sustainable for all sorts of reasons, to the point that even if this project *is* a failure, it could be kept afloat by the other irons they have in the fire. **tl;dr** All that to say that Steam charts are a data point that are bad at measuring this game's success.

It's $70 with minimal marketing

while i do agree with your reasoning i still think a 6x difference in concurrent players on steam says something about a game - especially on launch day/weekend. if a game is a big success it's a big success everywhere but then since avowed's budget was probably not as overblown as other current titles' budgets it might not be all too bad.

I do think it's reasonable to assume that STALKER 2 sold, in all likelihood, far more copies than Avowed. But for anything other than multiplayer games that rely on retention and monopolizing all of your time, I'd say Steam charts are a bad way to try to get an apples to apples comparison. Number of reviews has been the metric that I always hear devs using as a point of comparison. It still won't be a very accurate picture of how many copies it sold until you get far enough out that enough of the game's players have had time to finish the game, since that's when they're most likely to leave a review, but while I doubt Avowed's <7k reviews will catch up to STALKER 2's 82k by June, it doesn't mean Avowed is unsuccessful just because STALKER 2 was more successful.

I'm with you, I'm having a blast, but I think the reactions are because of the idea that it would be a Skyrim type game and... It's not really even trying to be that. Like you said, it's an ARPG, the roleplaying is basically just dialogue and most of the game is really well done exploration and combat.

Its also available on battle net where they keep advertising it to me . May be diluted by that too.

I hope MSFT sees it like Laura does. However it does look like they've been kind and patient with Obsidian so far (pentiment, grounded, Avowed pivots from dark live service to rainbow RPG, and sequel to Outer Worlds, an ok release). They're definitely happy with regularly shipped games of diverse genres and audiences for GamePass. In a way, a perfect studio for a subscription service.

Their other studios on the other hand, oofh. * Rare: Ever wild (sea of thieves helps tho) * Undead: State of Decay 3 (almost half a decade since announcement) * Initiative: Perfect Dark (vertical slice looked good, but maybe that's all they've made so far) * Turn10: Forza Motorsport (reboot didn't do anything it seems) * 343/Halo studios: ...

As per interviews Awoved pivoted in 2021 from dark multiplayer to what it is now. What that tells us is that it could've been something like Suicide Squad/Gotham Knights/Veilguard, but they successfully pivoted in the end.

That's 4y after the pivot and completely ignores the fact eora has been crafted, a lot of lore and worldbuilding already exists. They had 2y of production leading up to the pivot (assets et all) and, again, they are supported by one of the richest companies in the world. It's not a bad game, it most certainly isn't a good game, it's just mediocre. Fine for gamepass I guess but 70€ for such a poor delivery is asking too much. 15-30€ would be more appropriate. Probably will give it another shot at that price in less than half a year.

Actually I don't disagree with your premise. I definitely think US studios have either sat on their laurels or have had troubled development. I was just mentioning that it took 7 years since conception but the single player version is rather new. And pointing that out isn't some save, just an acknowledgement that the game did go through some crisis in development.

My point after the edit was one cannot and should not take Patel's words at face value, that story is a marketing campaign to deal with the poor reception for the game. I only realised that when I went looking for the story you mentioned and found nearly identical headlines from over 20 outlets at the same time. That's the same pattern as an AP or Reuters story so it's highly likely it was a distributed press brief as part of an MS campaign to recover the image of the game on the face of the underwhelming reception. It has dropped from [the top 100](https://steamdb.info/app/2457220/charts/) and now sits squarely in the [Grounded](https://steamdb.info/app/962130/charts/) or [New Vegas](https://steamdb.info/app/22380/charts/) corner less than a month after release. It "Is" an Obsidian game and yet completely lacks any staying power...

It is plausible, fair enough. I still think reaching the finish line is still good, as mentioned in the original post.