Campaigns on Kickstarter are now a common variant for development studios, including Obsidian Entertainment. In an interview, director Joshua Sawyer talks about the hurdles he had to overcome with his idea and his fears that his game could fail before it was even developed. Today, his game has 87% positive ratings on Steam.
What game is it about? We’re talking about Pillars of Eternity. The CRPG was released for PC on March 26, 2015. This was followed by a release for PS4 and Xbox in August 2017, and it came out for Nintendo Switch in August 2019.
It was previously funded through a campaign on Kickstarter, the funding goal of which was reached after just 27 hours. After its release, the game received a lot of popularity and a number of positive reviews, so that today it is one of the most popular representatives of its genre with around 87% positive reviews on Steam.
However, it wasn’t initially certain that the game would be able to celebrate this success, because there was originally a lot going against the Kickstarter campaign, as director Joshua Sawyer reported in an interview with Edge Magazine (issue #404).
Here you can see the trailer for Pillars of Eternity:
Pillars of Eternity: The trailer for the RPG
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“I thought there was a 50/50 chance of us getting funded in a month.”
What was the problem with his idea? Since Obsidian Entertainment’s financial situation was not particularly stable at the time, the idea was to finance new projects through crowdfunding. The idea was to create a game that would combine the best elements from games like Planescape: Torment, Icewind Dale and Baldur’s Gate. But old-school RPGs with isometric camera work weren’t exactly in demand back then.
And even though other studios were very successful with their campaigns at the time, Sawyer’s idea ran into headwinds from the studio’s owner. It would be too big a risk. But Sawyer insisted on his plan and other members of his team encouraged him.
The studio had already established itself in the role-playing genre with titles like Neverwinter Nights 2 and Fallout: New Vegas and the concept of the planned game was well received by the team. So the risk was ultimately taken and the campaign was launched on September 14, 2012.
Still, Sawyer was worried that Spiel wouldn’t be able to pull it off: “I thought there was a 50/50 chance of us getting the funding within a month and the fact that the funding was completed within 27 hours blew us away.”
How did the campaign go then? With over 73,000 supporters, almost 4 million US dollars were raised during the entire period of the campaign up to October 16, 2012 (via kickstarter.com). This means that almost four times the budget was raised than was originally planned as a financing target.
Joshua Sawyer has already been involved in many well-known titles and is also a big fan of the role-playing game genre himself. However, during a playthrough of Baldur’s Gate 3, he realized that a feature was being used far too much by players and was detracting from the gaming experience: He has created great role-playing games and today he says: A feature that many of you love was a mistake