Larian’s isometric fantasy RPG, Divinity: Original Sin, launched only a few days ago. It is currently at the top of the Steam charts, the studio’s fastest selling game, and it’s already getting close to becoming profitable.
“It’s definitely the fastest-selling game we’ve ever published,” Larian head honcho Swen Vincke told Eurogamer. “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.”
While Early Access continues to receive quite a bit of criticism, it’s been integral to Original Sin’s success,, along with the feedback from the Kickstarter backers.
“The feedback we received from them was worth its weight in gold,” Vincke said. “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.
With the game being delayed and the team working on it until the final day, Larian wasn’t even able to send out early review codes, so it remains – even now – almost entirely absent reviews. So it’s through word of mouth that Larian’s seeing this early success. Some of that’s from new customers, but undoubtedly those who have been playing since alpha are spreading the word.
While my review is not ready, I’ve been exceedingly impressed with Original Sin, which I’ve taken to describing as Drunk Ultima. It’s clever and silly in equal measure, and is thus far an RPG that channels all the things I loved about the genre in the ‘90s, while not being stuck in the past.
There’s still work to be done, with updates and exclusive content for Kickstarter backers, but beyond that, Vincke says the studio doesn’t have any concrete plans. “We sleep and then we’re going to have a party and then we’re going to sit together and figure out what the next game is,” Vincke said. “Nobody believes us but we really don’t have anything planned. This was all in for us. This was part of our plan when we started to go independent, that we’d make the biggest RPG we could with what we had in terms of money, and then we’ll see what comes out of it.”
Cheers, Eurogamer.