Obsidian released three major games in 2025, at a time when most major studios—especially those owned by Microsoft—struggle to ship one. Avowed and The Outer Worlds 2 were big tentpole first-person RPGs of a kind the industry used to dine out on, while Grounded 2—an early access survival crafting game set in a miniature world, co-developed in two years with Eidos Montreal—was ostensibly the more niche affair.
Nevertheless, it was Grounded 2 that proved a big hit, whereas Avowed and The Outer Worlds 2 both failed to meet the sales forecasts set by Microsoft, according to a new Bloomberg report.
“They’re [Avowed and The Outer Worlds 2] not disasters,” Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart told Bloomberg. “I’m not going to say this was a kick in the teeth. It was more like: ‘That sucks. What are we learning?’”
The disappointing results—and the success of Grounded 2—have led Obsidian to “think a lot about how much we put into the games, how much we spend on them, how long they take.” Urquhart wants Obsidian to make games in three to four year cycles.
“We don’t need to change everything every time,” he said. “We’ve had this debate internally: Do people really care that we spent an extra hundred person-months on the inventory screen?”
Avowed was clearly a pain point for Obisidan. In development for seven years, it started as an online-focused hybrid of Destiny and The Elder Scrolls before the project was scaled back. “My thought when I first saw it was, ‘I don’t think there’s a team on the planet that could execute on this,’” Obsidian director Josh Sawyer said of the initial scope.
Nevertheless, it looks like Avowed, and the Pillars of Eternity universe it belongs to, has a future. Obsidian will keep making games in the Avowed universe, while also working on “completely new games” and expansions for The Outer Worlds 2 and Grounded 2. As for a third Outer Worlds game, the studio isn’t working on one.
While two of Obsidian’s three 2025 RPGs failed to meet Microsoft’s targets, all were critical successes. Ted Litchfield thought The Outer Worlds 2 “surpassed its predecessor“, while Fraser called Grounded 2 “one of the best survival games I’ve ever played“. I called Avowed “an engrossing and gorgeous action-RPG set in one of the most engaging fantasy worlds around”.
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