Avowed and The Outer Worlds 2 were some of the best games released in 2025. We over here at Kotaku liked Avowed so much that we called it one of the 12 best games released last year. Meanwhile, The Outer Worlds 2 was my personal game of the year. A lot of other critics liked both of these Obsidian Entertainment-developed RPGs, too. But according to Obsidian, all that acclaim didn’t translate to big sales.
In a new feature from Bloomberg about Obsidian’s big year–the studio launched three games in 2025–there’s some bad news about two of those releases. According to Obsidian boss Feargus Urquhart, Avowed and The Outer Worlds 2 didn’t meet expectations.
“They’re not disasters,” Urquhart told the outlet. “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 sales for these two semi-open-world RPGs have Urquhart thinking “a lot about how much we put into the games, how much we spend on them, how long they take.” Both games took over six years to develop. Moving forward, Urquhart wants to cut down dev time to three to four years.
Meanwhile Grounded 2, a game developed primarily by Eidos, took around three years to develop and has ended up being a massive success for Obsidian. Yet another example of how it isn’t necessary to spend most of a decade making a game for it to sell millions of copies. It is also likely that the ongoing, large-scale BDS-connected No Games For Genocide boycott of Xbox over its connections to Israel and the country’s horrific attacks on Palestinians caused all of Obsidian’s games to sell fewer copies.
As for the future, Obsidian has no plans to develop The Outer Worlds 3 after the sequel failed to sell as well as expected. The RPG studio did confirm with Bloomberg that it is working on new content for The Outer Worlds 2, and future games will be made that take place in the same universe as Avowed (which shares a setting with the Pillars of Eternity games).
“Our job, all of us here, is to go make games that people want to play and buy,” said Urquhart, “and if we continue to do that, then we have a solid business.”
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