Three games in one year, solid reviews, but missed targets. For Obsidian Entertainment 2025 was productive – and yet sobering. The reason lies less in the quality of the games than in Microsoft's economic expectations.
Under the Xbox umbrella, creative success is no longer the only thing that counts; increasingly, hard-nosed profit targets are paramount. This is precisely where the structural problem begins, as a Bloomberg report disclosed.
Obsidian isn't a 1.000-person studio. Around 280 developers have to manage role-playing games that are becoming increasingly complex technically, narratively, and organizationally. When projects run for six or seven years, costs automatically explode, and with them, sales expectations. Even decent sales figures can suddenly seem like a failure.
Why long development cycles become a risk
The realization at Obsidian Entertainment is as simple as it is uncomfortable. Long development times are no longer a sign of quality, but a business risk. Spending years refining technology, animations, and systems ties up personnel, blocks resources, and increases the pressure on the release date.
Role-playing games certainly benefit from depth, but not necessarily from constantly reinventing technology. The internal question of whether players really need a completely new inventory system every time is valid. Technical reuse is not a step backward, but an economic necessity, especially in a market that no longer guarantees growth.
The quiet change in strategy at Obsidian Entertainment
Interestingly, Obsidian Entertainment isn't aiming for one sweeping overhaul. Instead, they're focusing on many small adjustments: more outsourcing, clearer decision-making processes, smaller teams per project, and staggered releases. Grounded 2 This shows that external development with clear leadership can work, sometimes even more efficiently than endless internal discussions.
Added to this is an approach that seems almost old-fashioned in today's AAA landscape: working on several projects in parallel instead of putting all your eggs in one basket with a single blockbuster. While this lowers the maximum hit potential, it reduces the risk of failure – a lesson many studios have learned the hard way.
Whether Obsidian Entertainment can pull off this balancing act depends less on vision than on discipline. The chosen path is no guarantee of hits, but possibly the only realistic way for an RPG studio to survive in the Xbox universe.
I have a suggestion for Obsidian: quit. Open a new studio, like the one in the New Vegas era, and make games for players again, not for shareholders.