A Quiet Miss With Loud Consequences
Avowed launched in February 2025 with a solid critical reception and a devoted fanbase ready to return to the Pillars of Eternity universe. By most creative measures, Obsidian delivered exactly what it set out to build – a dense, handcrafted first-person RPG with real character and sharp writing. But by the commercial measures that matter most inside a Microsoft-owned studio in 2025, the game fell short. Player counts plateaued quickly on Game Pass, physical sales were modest, and the post-launch conversation moved on faster than Obsidian’s internal teams would have liked.
That shortfall is now doing more than just closing the books on Avowed. It is actively shaping how Obsidian frames its next project internally – what gets pitched, how ambitious the scope is, and whether the studio leans back into the safety of the Fallout: New Vegas formula or takes another swing at something original. The pressure is not dramatic or public. It is the quiet kind, which tends to be the most consequential.
What “Underperformance” Actually Means at a Game Pass Studio
Measuring success for a game released day-one on Game Pass is genuinely complicated. Microsoft does not publish subscriber play data, so there is no clean number to point to. What does get tracked internally – and what shapes budget conversations – is engagement depth: how many players started the game, how many finished it, how long sessions ran, and whether the title drove new Game Pass sign-ups. On at least some of those metrics, Avowed reportedly did not perform at the level Microsoft needed to justify the resources poured into it. The game cost a significant amount to produce and market, and the return on that investment, measured by the metrics Microsoft actually cares about, came up short.
This matters specifically because of how Game Pass changes the economics of mid-tier RPGs. Before subscription services, a game like Avowed could find a long tail through discounted sales, cult status, and word-of-mouth across years. On Game Pass, the revenue logic is front-loaded. The platform needs players to subscribe or retain their subscription because of your game, ideally in the first few weeks. A slow-burn cult classic is almost the worst-case commercial outcome in that model – beloved by a small audience who would have bought it anyway, invisible to the casual browser scrolling through the library.
Obsidian built Avowed for a specific kind of RPG player. That audience showed up, appreciated the game, and moved on. The problem is that audience was not large enough, nor engaged long enough, to justify the game’s production scale by Microsoft’s internal math. That is not a creative failure. It is a structural mismatch between the studio’s strengths and the platform’s commercial needs.
There is also a comparison problem that Obsidian cannot escape. Baldur’s Gate 3 redefined what the market expects from a premium narrative RPG in terms of scope, reactivity, and length. Avowed was never trying to be that game, but players and executives alike now make that comparison reflexively. Obsidian is working in a world where the ceiling got raised dramatically right before their game launched.
How This Reshapes the Next Pitch
Inside studios operating under platform holders, underperforming titles rarely result in direct mandates from above. What happens instead is subtler: the internal conversation about the next project shifts. Proposals that would have sailed through on the strength of a previous hit now require more justification. Scope creep gets flagged earlier. The finance and strategy teams have more weight in the room when green-lighting begins.
For Obsidian, that likely means the next original IP pitch faces a higher bar than Avowed did when it went into production around 2019. The studio has The Outer Worlds 2 already in development, which offers a known quantity with an established audience – exactly the kind of lower-risk profile that looks attractive right now. But what comes after that is where the real question lives. Whether Obsidian gets room to develop another new world from scratch, or whether Microsoft steers them toward sequels and licensed work, will depend significantly on how the next eighteen months of internal conversations go.
Obsidian’s Identity Is the Real Stakes
Obsidian has always been a studio defined by creative ambition inside constrained budgets. Its best work – Pillars of Eternity, New Vegas, Tyranny – came from teams that knew exactly what they were making and for whom. Avowed was the studio’s first real attempt to build something at AAA scale with a AAA budget under Microsoft’s ownership, and the gap between creative intention and commercial expectation is now visible to everyone involved.
The studio’s leadership understands this tension better than anyone. Feargus Urquhart and his team have navigated studio-threatening situations before – Obsidian came extraordinarily close to shutting down before Pillars of Eternity’s crowdfunding campaign in 2012. The current situation is far less dire, but it carries its own kind of pressure. Studios that lose the confidence of their platform holder do not get shuttered overnight. They get redirected, restructured, or slowly hollowed out through project attrition.
The most telling signal will come not from any official announcement but from what Obsidian’s next original pitch looks like – whether it plays it safe with familiar structure and established IP logic, or whether the studio finds a way to make the case for another original world. Avowed’s commercial shortfall makes the second path harder to walk. It does not make it impossible, but the studio will need to answer a question that was not on the table two years ago: how do you build an Obsidian game that a casual Game Pass subscriber decides to spend sixty hours inside?
That is not a question Obsidian was ever designed to answer. And it may be the one Microsoft is now quietly asking them to figure out before the next greenlight conversation begins.
