Avowed and The Outer Worlds 2 have been a number of the finest video games launched in 2025. We over right here at Kotaku favored Avowed a lot that we known as it one of many 12 finest video games launched final yr. In the meantime, The Outer Worlds 2 was my private sport of the yr. Loads of different critics favored each of those Obsidian Leisure-developed RPGs, too. However in accordance with Obsidian, all that acclaim didn’t translate to massive gross sales.
In a brand new characteristic from Bloomberg about Obsidian’s massive yr–the studio launched three video games in 2025–there’s some dangerous information about two of these releases. In line with Obsidian boss Feargus Urquhart, Avowed and The Outer Worlds 2 didn’t meet expectations.
“They’re not disasters,” Urquhart informed the outlet. “I’m not going to say this was a kick within the tooth. It was extra like: ‘That sucks. What are we studying?’” The disappointing gross sales for these two semi-open-world RPGs have Urquhart pondering “rather a lot about how a lot we put into the video games, how a lot we spend on them, how lengthy they take.” Each video games took over six years to develop. Shifting ahead, Urquhart needs to chop down dev time to 3 to 4 years.
In the meantime Grounded 2, a sport developed primarily by Eidos, took round three years to develop and has ended up being an enormous success for Obsidian. Yet one more instance of the way it isn’t essential to spend most of a decade making a sport for it to promote tens of millions of copies. It’s also possible that the continuing, large-scale BDS-connected No Video games For Genocide boycott of Xbox over its connections to Israel and the nation’s horrific assaults on Palestinians induced all of Obsidian’s video games to promote fewer copies.
As for the long run, Obsidian has no plans to develop The Outer Worlds 3 after the sequel did not promote in addition to anticipated. The RPG studio did verify with Bloomberg that it’s engaged on new content material for The Outer Worlds 2, and future video games will probably be made that happen in the identical universe as Avowed (which shares a setting with the Pillars of Eternity video games).
“Our job, all of us right here, is to go make video games that individuals need to play and purchase,” stated Urquhart, “and if we proceed to try this, then we’ve a stable enterprise.”
