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As reported by Windows Central, Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart revealed the extent of the studio’s expansion since it was acquired by Microsoft in a recent interview with IGN. Since 2018, Obsidian has grown to nearly 300 employees, which is still pretty lean in the triple-A space.
“When we came on with XGS and Xbox , we were about 170, 180 people,” Urquhart told IGN. “And through the course of the last five or six years, we’ve not only grown the studio to about 285 people, but we also have a lot of really good co-dev partners with Heavy Iron and Beamdog.”
For comparison, here’s how large some other major developers are:
- Bungie: 850
- CD Projekt Red: 615
- Larian: 470
- Bethesda Game Studios: 450+
- Insomniac: 450 (YouTube video cited by Wikipedia has since been removed)
- Naughty Dog: 400+
- Valve: 336
- Sony Santa Monica: 250
- BioWare: Fewer than 100 (down from over 200)
- ZA/UM: ~70
Looking at those numbers, I’d put Obsidian at the lighter end of “midsize,” a welterweight studio. That’s something that makes its incredible productivity in recent years all the more surprising. As game budgets increase and five-plus-year development cycles become the norm, Obsidian has released three games since 2020—Grounded, Pentiment, and now Avowed—with a fourth, The Outer Worlds 2, due by the end of the year.
We’re not talking Valve levels of exerting more industry influence than 10,000-person conglomerates like Ubisoft or EA, but Obsidian’s still a studio punching above its weight. Clearly, there’s something to be said for the developer’s “100-year plan:” Assume each game will be a “mild success” and not a sales record-breaker, and allocate time, money, and staff accordingly. Obsidian’s games don’t push the envelope in terms of graphics or simulation tech, but instead impress through design, writing, and art direction. In a recent Bloomberg interview, Avowed lead Carrie Patel quoted the team as consisting of 80 people in 2021, or about a third of the studio.
The sober, restrained sense of scope Obsidian’s opted for in recent years stands in contrast with its wildly ambitious early games like Knights of the Old Republic 2 or New Vegas, which attempted to deliver on visionary promises in plus or minus one-year development cycles. They were amazing games, but they also wound up screaming across the finish line on fire and with their wheels falling off, and the studio underwent layoffs with its doors almost closing for good in the early 2010s. Obsidian’s strategy is also an outlier in the games industry right now, with larger teams requiring more money and time to make games that each need to be a smash hit under threat of mass layoffs, while not necessarily having the vision or promise to justify such investments in the first place. I love sumptuous triple-A excess as much as the next guy, but not everybody is going to make Cyberpunk 2077 or Baldur’s Gate 3.
And Obsidian has proven that the games resulting from more disciplined development practices won’t be an inferior product or a downgrade where it counts. Pentiment and Avowed are among my favorite games of recent years—sorry Grounded, not a survival guy, but Fraser really liked you—and I’ve certainly enjoyed them more than most of the mega-budget fare on offer.
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Kurt Indovina
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