Larian Studios’ Divinity: Original Sin scratches a gaming itch that’s often difficult to reach. A polished and deep Baldur’s Gate-style RPG with co-op? Into which vessel should I deposit my hard-earned doubloons to acquire this scrumptious electronic morsel? Well, Steam’s the place for your antiquated currency! The game’s not only sitting in the digital distributor’s #1 spot, it has over 160,000 sales to show for it.
Our impressions of Original Sin last week were overwhelmingly positive and this appears to be a sentiment shared by a great number of other gamers. Speaking with Eurogamer’s Wesley Yin-Poole, Larian founder Swen Vincke said that while the company knew the game would do alright, it wasn’t quite prepared for this level of success:
“It’s definitely the fastest-selling game we’ve ever published. The last figures I saw we were at 160,000. For us that’s pretty good. We’re definitely going to break even and hopefully we’ll make sufficient profit for our next game.”
Yin-Poole estimates the game has brought in €3.19m — $4.63m in Australian dollars — for the developer.
As to why it’s doing so well, Vincke credits Kickstarter, Steam Early Access and “word-of-mouth”. Apparently Larian spent hardly anything on advertising and in terms of reviews, it really hasn’t garnered a huge amount of interest just yet. Vincke also says the feedback it gathered during the Early Access period helped the studio create a game its audience really wanted to play:
“It’s almost a co-development between us and them, because they pointed out things we were doing wrong, and encouraged us to expand on the areas we were doing right. As a result you get a group intelligence applied to a game. It’s always much better than a single person.”
It’s nice to see a classically-moulded RPG from an indie sitting at the top of the Steam charts. Open-world survival games seem to dominate these days, so it’s good to see things being mixed up.
Divinity: Original Sin Larian Studios’ fastest-selling game ever [Eurogamer]
Comments
12 responses to “Divinity: Original Sin Has Already Sold 160,000 Copies”
Nearly 20,000 backers on their Kickstarter. Are those apart of the sales?
Yeah, that’s separate from kickstarter backers.
What about early access buyers? Are they included?
1 week from now, 1mil copies sold!
I better get myself a copy and see if my brother will bother to co-op with me
“Vincke also says the feedback it gathered during the Early Access period helped the studio create a game its audience really wanted to play”
This one line has just given me a warm feeling for the entire games industry. This would be like a TV station doing a poll to find out what type of shows people wanted to watch… then making that show rather than just making the cheapest “eh it’ll do” they can.
I know what you’re saying but have to disagree. I think polling people on a creative endeavor is generally a horrible way to create something. TV stations do this all the time and you end up getting crap shows that cater to the lowest common denominator. I’d much rather a creative person or team be allowed to follow their vision and not get too bogged down on what everyone wants. Because, let’s face it, you can’t please everyone. You never got anything unique by polling and catering to the masses.
I’m glad this game is going well, I was in the early access and really enjoyed it. I’m pretty sure it’s going to take off once some more reviews flow in. (They are still patching a few bugs as they are identified too) I’d like to see them drop a bit of the cash they’ve made on some advertising now, pretty sure that’d boost sales as well.
All the people saying ‘It feels like Ultima 7 are accurate’ and accurate in a good way. I know a game is immersive when I can just wander round doing non-quest stuff for a couple of hours.
I’m really glad the game is doing well for them. One of, if not the best rpg in the last 5 years. I’m 30 hrs through and just opened up the second area – really enjoying it. If wasteland 2, pillars of eternity and the new torment are 1/2 as good as this that’ll do for me.
I checked meta critic as i was intrested to see what ‘critics’ thought. It amazes me that after 5 days there is two reviews for it. It boggles the mind. Is this normal? I assume it has to do with how deeply publishers dig their claws into gaming sites or paid advertising. Sad really. At least the user score reflects the game.
http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/divinity-original-sin
The game wasn’t ready for review! They have been working on it up until release, so I doubt there was a copy they were happy to send out. It’ll get there!
It’s a great game. I think a feature of early access is that some sites are now doing “early access reviews” that don’t count towards metacritic, and because they’ve already been covered in early access, smaller titles like this one don’t get covered again.
My partner and I started playing this co-op at about 10am this morning “just for a couple of hours”. It’s now 7:10pm and we’ve only just managed to drag ourselves away from it. Fantastic game.
wish we could bring in one of our own characters into coop
well I got a copy last week, so that’s one.
I’m planning on buying it and I haven’t even seen a damn thing about it anywhere. PURE ‘word of mouth’ advertising.
I have played the first couple of hours with a friend in co-op and its quite fun and reasonably priced.
Still some bugs though. Something that was hilarious up until it was patch fixed is that having a disagreement with an NPC meant playing scissors paper rock with them. And if you lost then they would try to kill you!
EXTREME SCISSORS PAPER ROCK.
But I was playing last night and it seems to be fixed.
Good art I think, and combat system good. I found that there was a lot more detective work (ie no fighting) for a big part near the start.
Oh and my backstab character is very fun to play. crit for the win