Obsidian’s latest game Avowed has been out for a few days now, and even longer for anyone who opted to pony up extra cash. The game launched to fairly strong reviews and currently holds a ” Very Positive” rating on Steam, so people seem to be enjoying it. However, the player numbers seem soft so far.
Before we dive into those numbers, though, we do need to consider that it’s incredibly difficult to gauge Avowed’s level of success based purely on player counts on Steam. The game has launched straight onto Game Pass, so we can safely assume a reasonable chunk of the PC crowd are likely playing via the Game Pass app. And then, of course, there’s console as well. But the visible Steam numbers do still give us at least a broad look at how it’s doing.
According to SteamDB, Avowed has managed a peak concurrent player count of 17,490, which was achieved 19 hours ago as of the time of writing. Its highest peak player count prior to its full launch on February 18 was a little over 13,000, so it definitely picked up more players once it became available to everyone.
So, let’s put those numbers into some context, shall we? Avowed’s peak player count puts it right on the lower end of Obsidian’s releases. Both Pillars of Eternity and Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire (Avowed takes place in the same universe) achieved higher peak player counts, clocking 41,906 and 22,724 respectively. Avowed also didn’t beat The Outer Worlds (20,349), South Park: The Stick of Truth (34,811), Grounded (32,012) or Fallout: New Vegas (51,038).
But Avowed has so far beat Pentiment (1,250), Tyranny (15,792), Knights of the old Republic 2 (6,581), Dungeon Siege 3 (4,189) and The Outer Worlds: Spacer’s Choice Edition (1,305).
It gets worse if you put Avowed against games outside the Obsidian family, too. The obvious comparison is another recently released singleplayer RPG built by a fairly small team. Yup, I’m talking about Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 which managed a massive peak player count on Steam of 256,206, and hit 142,688 concurrent players in the last 24-hours. At the time of writing, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 has over 2 million copies sold.
Of course, the truly important figures to consider are those that we cannot get: the development budget. Only that number would help us determine whether Avowed has been successful in terms of actual profit, although even that is a muddy topic when you involve Game Pass because Game Pass’ metrics for success are entirely different. With that said, we do know Avowed is not a triple-A project and is certainly on the smaller end of the development scale, probably somewhere in the ballpark of $50-100 million.
As for me, I’ve been playing the game and plan on reviewing it. So far, I’m actually having a lot of fun with it. That said, it’s nothing special and lacking Obsidian’s usually high-quality writing, leaving it as an entertaining but mindless RPG.