"A lot of people" at Avowed studio Obsidian would be up for a Pillars Of Eternity tactics spin off
But "not that many" would buy it, says Josh Sawyer
Pentiment, Pillars Of Eternity, and Fallout: New Vegas director Josh Sawyer says there's enthusiasm at Obsidian for a potential tactics game set in the same universe as Avowed and the Pillars RPGs, but he's not sure the audience is there for it. "Pillars Tactics is a thing that a lot of people at the studio would like to work on, and there are a lot of people that like tactics games," he recently said on a livestream, but they'd need to work out "a scope of development where it feels like it could actually make money." (Cheers, GamesRadar)
This isn't the first time Sawyer has mentioned such a project. He said last September that a few developers at Obsidian have "floated" the idea. According to Sawyer, the audience "is not huge, typically, but very passionate. People that are into [strategy] RPGs, tactical RPGs, they'll play a lot of them, even if they're not that good. It's a hard one to make a case for," but "every once in a while we bring it up and go 'oh, we could maybe…"
The Pentiment dev returned to these sentiments in the recent livestream. "Tactics games have a very enthusiastic fanbase, but the fanbase is not humungous," he said. "It's sort of like that floor is high - like, if you make a decent tactics game, those people are gonna buy it. But if all of them buy it, that's still not that many people."
Obsidian Chief Egg Overseer Feargus Urquhart recently revealed in an Ian Games interview that the studio was still fairly modestly sized for the big budget RPG space, with nearly 300 employees compared to, for example, CD Projekt Red's 615 or Larian's 470 (thanks PC Gamer). That's not gigantic for a studio that has another RPG project, Outer Worlds 2, following Avowed later this year, so it's not surprising they'd want to be careful with how they allocate resources. Their approach to financials is refreshing too, saying in a recent DICE talk that they go into each project assuming "mild success" rather than gangbusters.
I'm extrapolating a bit here, but it sounds to me like (at the studio level at least) they're a team that want to make money so they can make more games rather than the depressingly common inverse. Whatever I thought of Avowed, that feels like something to celebrate.