Dungeon Siege III Interview, Obsidian’s Games Sell Better in Europe

CVG recently had the opportunity to chat with Obsidian Entertainment’s Nathaniel Chapman and Gas Powered Games’ Chris Taylor about their relationship with Square Enix, the current state of the PC platform, and, of course, Dungeon Siege III. After talking a bit about the similarities between the console and PC version, Nathan goes on to reveal that Obsidian’s games sell better in Europe:

Can you tell us about the jump-in jump-out co-op system on PC?

NC: It will work just the same; you can have another person on a controller and it will work just the same. As far as other multiplayer stuff we can’t really talk about that but there will be more in a few months.

There’s nothing PC specific. What I mean to say is that we’ve taken the heart of what you expect out of a PC RPG and brought it into this game. You should have a similar gameplay experience no matter what.

…

How important is Europe to you?

NC: We play a lot of attention to Europe; all of our games have sold better in Europe than in America. We definitely pay a lot of attention to localisation, that’s something that we spend a lot of time figuring out how we can make sure our games are easy to localise, so we can have a French, German, Spanish SKU of the game and not worry about that being a huge cost or difficult to develop. It is definitely something we pay attention to.

CT: When I think about designing a brand new game, first sheet of paper, I think about Europe. If you had to go in order you’d think about Europe, then switch over to thinking about China and then come back to the US and possibly Korea.

I don’t think anybody would sit there and think about a U.S. market unless they were going for a casual game like Zynga because that justifies it. When it comes to what we do; PC and console type games, you have to start with a European gamer.

RPGs have always done well in Europe, so I suppose the news is somewhat unsurprising.