A 150-200k sales is pretty bad for a game that was in development for 4+ years and had a decently sized team, even getting assistance from Microsoft after they acquired Obsidian. Indie games routinely sell more than that.
Pentiment's core team was 13 people (scaling up from an initial two). Sawyer compared it to Night in the Woods which was released in 2017.
Emphasis on "back in those days." The Secret of Monkey Island came out 34 years ago. It took about a year to develop, not 4+ years like Pentiment. It was also more of an actual game than Pentiment, with an inventory and verb system, things which Pentiment lacks.
Not according to the credits. I noticed 3 different people are credited for "Particle Beam" for some reason, which suggests development wasn't terribly efficient.
Particle Beam were contractors obviously. Cost cutting.
Well, let's math it... Started with Sawyer and Kennedy, Obsidian art director, then grew to 13 people during development [1], let's lowball it to an average 60K a head [2] over 4 years, round it down to a cool $3 million, plus studio overheads and marketing, could go upwards of $3.5 million. The game's RRP is apparently twenty bucks, take that most generous 260K units from SteamSpy, that's $5.2 million minus Gabe's 30% cut, you get $3.6 million revenue. This is all rough speculation but, yeah, it probably didn't do gangbusters.
Would require more precise math since 4 years is an overstatement:
Sawyer's full 200K plus as little as 50K for Kennedy (since she's presumably doing other things) for 3 years, plus the other 11 staff at a low average of 60K each for two years - that's $2m plus your overheads (studio, VO, marketing etc.), upwards of $2.5m versus that optimistic $3.6m take. I'm not saying the thing flopped, just that I doubt it made Feargus break for an early Christmas. That tracks with Microsoft not giving a shit, a couple hundred grand up or down won't even bleep their radar, not on an asset like Obsidian which has bigger fish to fry for 'em.
The success of Fallout New Vegas gave him a lot of clout. Pillars of Eternity (the first one) kept up that rep. Deadfire's long tail eventually vindicated his choices. Pentiment's critical success justifies its existence.
Time to go indie then. Maybe he should become another stretch goal in kickstarter projects.
It's a carrot and stick question. If I know Paramo and Patel are leads, and Josh gets announced as a KS goal, I'm pulling out the wallet.
Ain't met a lot of people who like working on stuff they don't like.
Arguably, he has over the past couple of years, he got his own little indie project with Pentiment. If Feargus was happy to keep paying him the big bucks all the while, you can't blame the man for rolling with it.
And before that - the Pillars PnP ruleset.
Just imagine, Sawyer travelling from studio to studio, balancing everything and sucking the fun out of every video game within 1000 mile radius.
