Xbox's Obsidian Entertainment released a whopping three games throughout 2025 alone; one of them being a smaller effort in Grounded 2, while Avowed and The Outer Worlds 2 delivered big AAA experiences to players last year. And, as it turns out, those latter two failed to meet sales targets at Xbox.
In a new piece over at Bloomberg, Jason Schreier talks about Obsidian's 2025, and how its packed release schedule landed with players. The outlet mentions that Avowed and The Outer Worlds 2 "failed to meet sales forecasts set by Obsidian’s parent company, Microsoft" - which studio head Feargus Urquhart responded to:
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"They’re not disasters, [...] I’m not going to say this was a kick in the teeth. It was more like: "That sucks. What are we learning?'"
In terms of those learnings, the Obsidian head mentions that the team wants to cut down development times on future AAA titles, with Avowed and The Outer Worlds 2 taking upwards of six, seven years to make. The studio hopes that smaller budgets and three, four year dev cycles can become the norm; something that's been demonstrated well with Grounded 2 here.
Still, Urquhart seems fairly relaxed about things at the moment, with more Avowed planned for the future in some form or another - and there's the PS5 release right around the corner, which could help the team meet its targets too. The Outer Worlds 3 seemingly isn't happening, though, and the Obsidian boss hopes that the studio will be able to continue taking risks with future titles.
The hope, Urquhart says, is that Xbox continues to fund riskier projects and values achievements besides strong sales, even if it means accepting that “maybe where we are going to be from a profitability standpoint isn’t going to be 30%.”
"Our job, all of us here, is to go make games that people want to play and buy, and if we continue to do that, then we have a solid business,"
Indeed, despite Microsoft recently denying such a figure for profit targets at Xbox, Bloomberg previously reported this number, and it's obviously been referenced by the Obsidian boss here. Whatever the exact target may be, Avowed and The Outer Worlds 2 clearly didn't meet it, but we too hope the team still gets to experiment with future titles and put out more stellar work under the Xbox Game Studios banner.