GB Feature: Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire Interview

While Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire is now successfully funded and moving on toward more stretch goals following its Fig campaign, I was able to sit down with Obsidian Entertainment CEO Feargus Urquhart earlier this month and chat with him at length about the business side of crowdfunding, the RPG sequel’s design goals, their forthcoming Pillars of Eternity tabletop RPG, the “super secret” project being worked on by Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky, and much more. There’s a lot to take in across all seven pages of the Q&A, but I’ll start you off with a couple of choice quotes:

Buck: Sure. I find the business side of this fascinating, and while I don’t want to focus too much on that, I’m curious what your post-funding sales have been for Pillars of Eternity? That initial funding amount would have included a lot of people like me who absolutely wanted a copy on day one and to be part of the pledging process, but how have your sales been since that point?

Feargus: So the latest information we have is from our last royalty report that we got from Paradox. And the last number was like – I think we’re under just 900,000 units. So about 900,000 units was what we sold of the core product after the game came out.

Buck: So with the Kickstarter pledges, does that put you well over a million units sold?

Feargus: Yes, yes. If you include all the Kickstarter pledges, we would be at about a million.

…

Buck: One of the things I was wondering about, too, is since the release of Pillars of Eternity and the White March expansions, we haven’t seen a compilation or bundle released. Do you plan on having a bundle of the core game plus expansions, possibly even with something a little extra? Maybe even an enhanced edition of some sort?

Feargus: Yes, so we’ve been talking to Paradox about that a lot and we’re going to have something up soon. I don’t know if it’s in 30 days or 60 days or something like that. But we’re going to have something pretty soon.

A lot of it is interesting because we’ve been talking a lot like how to come up with what is the price point? And I don’t know if anybody really cares about this, but Steam is a really interesting ecology – don’t know if that’s the right word – of where you put your prices and how do you do this and how do you take your pricing to a point based upon discounts you’re going to do. So where do you put your price based upon – are you going to put out a sale at the start or not put out a sale at the start? And when it wasn’t a bundle, what was your max sales on each part of the bundle? Because you don’t want to make your first sale on the bundle if it’s very close to when you did the last sale on the parts is much less because people will be pissed off that they just bought something and now it’s cheaper.

So it’s interesting. It seemed to us like it’s a simple proposition to figure this all out, and then as we started to think about it more and more, it was complicated.