New Report Reveals What Obsidian’s Recovery Looks Like After Two Trade Misses in 2025

Obsidian Entertainment was one of the busiest studios in 2025, not just releasing a single, but three major titles last year. He started the year He agreed in February 2025, followed Grounded 2 released in early access in July 2025, and closed the year with Outer worlds 2 in October 2025. Two of those three games didn’t do well in terms of sales (although they were well received by critics, especially here at Wccftech), and a new report from Bloomberg explores that the studio is looking to return and “re.”

If you can’t guess which of these two games missed the mark in terms of sales, it was The Outer Worlds 2 and Avowed, although the studio head of Obsidian Entertainment. Feargus Urquhart he is quick to note that they were not perfect bombs. “They are not disasters. I can’t say this was a kick in the teeth,” Urquhart said.It was like this: ‘That’s incredible. What are we learning?‘”

One of those factors is how long the studio takes on its projects. Avowed and Outer Worlds 2 both took half a decade to make, and Urquhart (and the rest of the studio, it seems) wants to cut that time in half, within reason. When Avowed was pitched to Microsoft, it was initially considered a big, ambitious crossover. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim again Destiny 2. As the studio’s design director, Josh Sawyer put: “I don’t think there is a team in the world that could use this.”

Obviously, that’s not what Avowed ended up being, but by the time the decision was made to eliminate the multiplayer part and give a new director to the game, it had improved. three years. It took the essence seven years to find out what we know Avowed to go out the door.

About the time spent developing Outer Worlds 2, which took six years between the release of the original game and the release of its sequel, the game director Brandon Adler he said, “I don’t think anyone really likes five, six, seven year dev cycles. We have grown up to be that.”

As for why Grounded 2 was able to come together faster than Outer Worlds 2 and Avowed, which came out Eidos Montreal positioning themselves as Obsidian’s support studio. With the help of Eidos, and the distance gained by not developing everything internally, the founder of Obsidian and one of the directors in charge of the game, Chris Parkerhe noted that it gave them the grace to make decisions quickly.

“I was like, ‘If this was one of our internal teams, we’d be working on this for another two or three months,'” when discussing the decision to stop making rideable bugs in Grounded 2 shared by two or more players at once.We called them because we could tell them what to do. It feels like we’re still running around with kid gloves on inside.”

Perhaps the worst quote in the report, about how the studio needs to take a hard look at its processes and work toward change, comes from Sawyer. Regarding Obsidian releasing three games last year, he said, “Putting gaps in those releases helps the company manage its resources and not burn everyone out. It’s not good to release three games in one year. It is the result of things going wrong.”

Relying on support studios seems like one strategy a studio might use to make quick decisions, but a more reliable strategy would be to reuse technology and systems where possible, instead of starting from scratch every time. “We don’t have to change everything all the time,” Urquhart said.We had this debate internally: Do people really care that we spent a hundred man-months on an innovation screen?“

At the same time, Urquhart also noted that when performing postmortems on Outer Worlds 2 and Avowed, it can be small differences that make a big impact on the success of the game. The problem is figuring out how those little details are meant to go. “Our job, all of us here, is to make games that people want to play and buy, and if we continue to do that, we’re going to have a strong business..”

Reducing development times by additional releases again reuse technology where possible are two important aspects of Obsidian Entertainment’s future plan. Also included in those programs is the development of budding engineers, through Urquhart training Justin Birtch again Marcus Morgan to take his place one day in the studio office, and to be multiple, small projects on the go at onceinstead of one big project that consumes the entire workforce.

“You need to keep having at-bats, because sometimes, if you can’t consistently do good things, you’re going to get those hits.,” said Morgan.

As for Obsidian Entertainment’s next “at bats,” the report confirms what we’ve heard before, that the studio isn’t working Outer worlds 3but instead focuses on new games in The ordinary world as its next big project. Along with that, it will be working on new content for Grounded 2 and Outer Worlds 2, and whatever that is. It falls the creator Tim Cain he recently returned to Obsidian full time to work.

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