14 DAY TRIAL // Divinity: Original Sin, the very old-school fantasy role-playing game just released by Belgium-based Larian Studios, maker of the Divinity series, has become the developer's fastest-selling title in recorded history.
The game was launched on June 30, after spending half a year as a Steam Early Access title, and since its release it has managed to move 160k copies, being the top-selling game on Steam at the time of writing.
Swen Vincke, the head of video game developer Larian Studios, says that the game is already approaching profitability. Divinity: Original Sin cost somewhere around $5.5 / €4 million to make and was created thanks to a very successful Kickstarter campaign that raised close to 20 percent of the total amount invested in the game's development process so far.
"It's doing pretty well. We're very happy about it. And to be honest we didn't expect it. We thought it was going to do well but not this well," Swen Vincke tells Eurogamer.
"It's definitely the fastest-selling game we've ever published. The last figures I saw we were at 160,000. For us that's pretty good. We're definitely going to break even and hopefully we'll make sufficient profit for our next game," he continues.
Vincke explains that the main reason for the game's success is the fact that its Steam Early Access and Kickstarter communities were so actively involved in the development process.
"The feedback we received from them was worth its weight in gold. It's almost a co-development between us and them, because they pointed out things we were doing wrong, and encouraged us to expand on the areas we were doing right. As a result you get a group intelligence applied to a game. It's always much better than a single person," he details.
Furthermore, he says that that game's current success can be attributed to word of mouth and the community's efforts to push the game. The development team was a bit late with the game, working very hard on it until the last day in order to meet the launch date, and the game's reviews are not out yet, their marketing efforts consisting of exactly two ads, he adds.
It's little wonder that word of mouth can push Divinity: Original Sin, when it has Steam reviews like this one, "Told a guy to steal a fish and got him arrested. Then went to the prison, freed him, and murdered him. 10/10."
The role-playing game focuses a lot on player agency and complex interactions with NPCs, is set in a very lively world with a very rich backstory to explore, and brings a lot of innovative concepts to the table. Among these is being able to use various aspects of the environment in certain unusual ways, such as electrocuting enemies that are sitting in a puddle or calling forth a rain spell in order to douse fires and gain a slight resistance bonus to fire-based attacks.