Sven Vinke, founder of Larian Studios, has written a blog post about the reaction to his team’s latest game. Divinity: Original Sin was largely funded thanks to a successful Kickstarter campaign that raised over $1 million. According to Vinke, the game has now sold ”well over” 500,000 copies meaning that the project has now reached profitability. ”While not all of the money is for us as we had private investors on board, the game did sufficiently well for us to envision funding our next endeavors with it, meaning we’re pretty happy about its performance,” he said. “So much for turn-based fantasy RPGs not selling, crowdfunding not working and a developer like us not being capable of bringing a game to market without the help of seasoned publishers.”
As well as the commercial success, the reception from fans and the press have also been pretty pleasing for Vinke. He pointed out that the game’s ”Metacritic critic rating is at 87%, it’s user rating at 89%”. ”We do this job because we enjoy entertaining other people with our imaginations,” he added, ”and when it’s successful, it makes us feel all good inside. We’re very grateful for the many thank you messages we received from our players: it’s these shows of appreciation that fuel us when the night is dark and the task list long, and it’s what makes this job so incredibly cool.”
So what’s next for the Belgian developer? “The foreseeable future for Larian (i.e. the next couple of years) is going to see us making further progress in improving our RPG craft and creating dense game worlds with hopefully new and innovative gameplay systems based on old school values,” Vincke said. “The current thinking is that we shouldn’t go back to Kickstarter. That’s not because we’re ungrateful of the support we received through our Kickstarter community or because all those rewards caused a bit of extra work, but because I think the crowdfunding pool is limited and it should be fished in by those who really need it.”
Will Larian start work on another Divinity game or will they make something totally new? Vinke isn’t giving away any hints so we’ll just have to wait and see.
Via Lar.net