Obsidian Entertainment managed to release three games in 2025, two full-blown RPGs and a survival experience. While impressive from the outside, the heads of the studio are saying it is unsustainable for the 280-person team and have some ideas on how it"s going to work in the future, especially to avoid long development times.
The Microsoft-owned developer revealed that the two RPGs from last year, fantasy entry Avowed and the sci-fi entry The Outer Worlds 2 had been in development at the studio for over six years. It now wants to target three- to four-year development cycles instead.
In an interview with Bloomberg"s Jason Schreier, Feargus Urquhart, the head of Obsidian Entertainment, said that last year"s survival game Grounded 2 had been a hit, meeting Microsoft"s expectations, which leaks say are quite drastic. However, both RPGs hadn"t reached those same goals, and with all the Xbox cuts, it looks like Obsidian is under some pressure to make changes.
“They’re not disasters,” says Urquhart, about the two RPGs" sales performance. “I’m not going to say this was a kick in the teeth. It was more like: ‘That sucks. What are we learning?’”
One strategy Obsidian is looking at is something it did with Fallout: New Vegas, reusing technologies and assets from previous games. "We don’t need to change everything every time. We’ve had this debate internally: Do people really care that we spent an extra hundred person-months on the inventory screen?" adds Urquhart.
Outsourcing is another strategy, which it is already said to be doing with Grounded 2. Eidos Interactive has been the workforce behind the early access project so far, with Obsidian supervising the survival series.
Obsidian"s next steps are reportedly to deliver new game projects, both big and small, while also delivering more content to The Outer Worlds 2 and Grounded 2. The studio already has plans to make more games set in the Pillars of Eternity/Avowed universe, but another entry into The Outer Worlds series isn"t currently in development.