I don’t think Unavowed’s secret sauce is romance as far as I know, it doesn’t have romance at all. Primordia didn’t have any AOD doesn’t have any. Romances aren’t the only thing that gets an emotional connection obviously. ME and DA:O both added extensive romance scenes (including sex scenes IIRC). DA:O made added new dating sim mechanics like gift giving. When I worked on DA:O, the Barbarian origin story I did (ultimately cut) had to include two romance options (available irrespective of gender). And the guy making Broken Hourglass (Jason Compton?) flagged NPC romancing as a pillar of BioWare gaming. That stopped with Bioware because it was bought up by a company that didn't know how to brew the liquor but if the end result of this is Dave selling WEG to EA, three cheers for his success! More likely, he'll stay his own master and draw forth fans' enthusiasm in this vein for the next decade as he has for the past decade. He's going to proceed like Bioware did - distilling that formula into stronger and stronger proof, with fans getting drunker and drunker on it. The comparison to Bioware in that sense is warranted: Dave has found a formula that achieves both market success and a close emotional connection with his players. This particular manifestation of player enthusiasm is cringeworthy, but what it is emerging from is something real: WEG's first in-house title that is a massive commercial success, and only commercial success other than Primordia and perhaps Technobablyon that has massive player engagement. If you poke around Twitter you see comparable levels of player engagement and enthusiasm. It was the third WEG title (after Primordia and Technobablyon) to win the "Overwhelmingly Positive" rating on Steam. Within a year, Unavowed will become the second WEG title (after Primordia) to break 1000 player reviews. Unavowed is 95% positive and has 835 reviews - just about the same as as Gemini Rue (877). But Steamcharts shows Unavowed having concurrent player figures in its third year of release that are comparable to Gemini Rue at launch. It's no longer possible to get reliable sales figures out of Steamspy. For instance, Blackwell Epiphany seems to have sold perhaps 20% as many copies as Gemini Rue, but has about 60% the number of reviews (i.e., three times the yield). The in-house Blackwell games tended to come in around ~95%+ positive (i.e., comparable to Primordia's 97%) and seem to have a similarly high rate of reviews per sale. Excluding Primordia, the published games tended to come in around ~90% popular with players (Gemini Rue is 89%, Resonance is 90%, Shardlight is 89%) and have relatively light player engagement (for instance, I think Gemini Rue sold about the same number of copies as Primordia, but has about 1/3 the reviews). During this phase, WEG established itself as a publisher of commercially successful titles and a developer of fan-favorite niche games. Even if many of these were sold at a discount, it was something like a 10-20-fold revenue increase. I'm not sure now whether Gemini Rue or Primordia was the most successful of the published titles, but whereas prior games had not even yielded six figures in revenue, the published games (Gemini Rue, Resonance, Primordia, Technobabylon) all yielded six figures in copies sold. Dave wrote, "I have yet to make a game that comes close to six figures." (This was circa Blackwell Deception, before Dave published Gemini Rue.)ĭave then became a really successful publisher. When Vic and I were just starting developing Primordia a decade ago, I reached out to Dave for some advice on game development, whether it made sense for us to make more adventures after Primordia or switch to a different genre. Anyway, the thing is that it's very hard to capture just how much Unavowed has vindicated (and perhaps in some sense changed) WEG from a business standpoint.
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