LogInIt's Avowed all over again, with player numbers showing people just aren't that into Obsidian's RPGs anymore.
As predicted from its pre-release performance, Obsidian Entertainment's The Outer Worlds 2 has repeated the story of Avowed, releasing to generally positive player reviews but with virtually no interest from the gaming community, posting unimpressive player counts on the largest PC gaming platform and barely cracking Steam's Top 100 most played games on release day.
Obsidian
SteamDB data shows that on release day, The Outer Worlds 2 peaked at just 13,264 concurrent players on Steam – even lower than Avowed – before the graph flatlined and began going down after a few hours.
As with any game, the number will almost certainly rise over the weekend, but with results like this, it's questionable whether The Outer Worlds 2 will be able to surpass 20,000 concurrent players, and uncertain whether it can beat the Steam active player number records of Avowed (19,198) or the original The Outer Worlds (20,349), the latter of which, for context, only launched on Steam after a year of Epic Games Store exclusivity.
Further underscoring the notion of The Outer Worlds 2 as Avowed 2.0 is the similarity in reception, as the game received generally positive reviews from players, with its Steam rating currently at 84%. As with Avowed, however, the individual reviews tell a conflicting story, with different players criticizing and praising the same aspects at the same time, making it harder to determine exactly what went wrong with the release.
One point that many reviewers, including those who gave TOW2 a thumbs-up, have agreed on is that the game is too expensive and doesn't offer enough entertainment value to justify its $70 AAA price. While this is speculative, it sure seems that the steep price is likely one of the main reasons PC players either skipped the sequel entirely or opted to play it via the cheaper Xbox Game Pass subscription, which would help explain low player numbers on Steam.
Speaking of Game Pass, The Outer Worlds 2's release was further disrupted by the Microsoft Azure outage, which made the game unavailable to purchase or install on Xbox Series X/S, the Xbox app on PC, and Game Pass for some players. "We're working with Microsoft to resolve the issue and will update players when we have more information," Obsidian noted. Talk about an 18-karat run of bad luck.
So what exactly went wrong, and why has Obsidian's new RPG attracted so few players? Was it the price? TOW2's lack of novelty that some reviewers have spotlighted? Avowed's mediocrity, which eroded trust in Obsidian? All of the above? Tell us what you think in the comments!
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