Divinity: Original Sin II - Interview with Michael Douse

Metro interviewed Larian's director of publishing Michael Douse about Divinity: Original Sin II and the marketing angle is explored also.

GC: It is always about the marketing. I’m a big fan of turn-based strategy games, especially XCOM – which your combat has something in common with, and I foolishly imagined it was going to be a big mainstream hit when they got it working so well on consoles. But of course it was a mild hit at best. But it seems with your games they should be much more successful than they are too, much better known…

MD: We’ve done a lot of data crunching, so we know what our market cap is on each console and PC. I think we’re about halfway through our market cap on PC, we can get another one-and-a-half to two-and-a-half million players I think on PC. But it’s true. And these kind of challenges, on how to communicate the game on many, many different levels, and dealing with the fact that people think it’s a CRPG when it’s really a co-op board game. All of these kind of things are a challenge.

And we’re growing, we’re successful, we’re not desperate. So working these things out with this kind of safe level of iteration, and growing as a publishing team and growing as a developer, it’s really a privileged place to be in. Because we’re not scrambling, we’re just listening and we’re watching and sort of growing. So I completely agree.

An interesting point about XCOM compared to CRPGs is we actually have more people who are XCOM players than we do that are Pillars Of Eternity players. So those parallels are really there, the data shows us that those parallels are there. But the most difficult thing, and I’ll tell you this, is trying to explain to publishing people why the game is such a success. It’s not the players.

The players, if you put it in their hands they have a great time, but people who look at this and go, ‘Well, why is this a success?’ They can’t work it out, and they don’t realise that it’s closer to a game like XCOM than it is Pillars and all of these kinds of things. So these are the greatest challenges. It’s more on the business side than it is on the community side.

The community really have our back. It’s really, really fun to work with everyone on that.

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