Obsidian plans to make RPGs for 100 years by 'not trying to grow aggressively, expand our team size, or make super profitable games'

In a talk at this week's D.I.C.E. Summit, an industry conference whose theme this year is sustainability, Obsidian Entertainment VP of operations Marcus Morgan and VP of development Justin Britch said they're aiming for the studio to be around for at least 100 years, and think it can get there by staying lean, holding onto talent, setting realistic sales expectations, and not going all-in on delivering huge profits. Obsidian's latest game is the just-released Avowed, an RPG we called both "humble and a little old-fashioned" and "engrossing and gorgeous" in our review.

Morgan and Britch brought a sense of humor to the presentation, but weren't joking about their ambition to set up the Fallout: New Vegas and Pillars of Eternity studio for at least 80 more years of game-making on top of the 20-plus already behind it. "Are we serious? … Yes," said Morgan.

Obsidian's 100-year plan isn't—and I hope this isn't too disappointing—a decade-by-decade breakdown of future projects that ends somewhere around Fallout: Old Vegas (I'm assuming that pre-apocalyptic settings are popular in 2103). It's more of a thought exercise, but the pair say it's motivated by a genuine intention to maintain a sustainable company beyond their own lifespans. (And why not? Nintendo was founded in 1889.)

One of the pillars of the plan is staying "lean and invested," meaning small enough that none of Obsidian's employees feel like a cog in a machine. Morgan and Britch said that in recent years they'd been considering opening multiple international offices, but in the end decided to partner with existing studios rather than risk weakening Obsidian's culture by growing too much.

Leanness can also refer to Obsidian's games: It doesn't aim for unprecedented scope or the most advanced graphics, and before it greenlights a game, Britch says the studio spends a lot of time determining how much to invest in the project with the assumption that it will be a "mild success," not a smash hit.

They didn't call out any examples themselves, but the duo was clearly setting themselves apart from companies that pour enormous budgets into long and turbulent development cycles and then announce that the resulting game underperformed because it didn't immediately sell tens of millions of copies. Dragon Age: The Veilguard is the most recent high-profile example of an expensive RPG that didn't meet its owner's sales expectations, and EA cut jobs at BioWare after the miss.

(Big bets do sometimes pay out, though: Baldur's Gate 3 comes to mind as a recent example, and although Cyberpunk 2077 took a while to find its way, CD Projekt continues to make a case for RPGs that take a long time and a lot of money to make.)

Obsidian has also laid off staff at times in the past, and has been in a precarious position at least once, but has appeared stable since Microsoft acquired it in 2018. That hasn't been the case for Microsoft's more recent acquisitions, which have been hammered with layoffs and studio closures from their new Xbox bosses. The difference can't be attributed to some secret sauce of Obsidian's—it's a much smaller company than Activision Blizzard or Bethesda, and a different kind of acquisition for Microsoft—but the studio's strong showing at a time when much of the industry seems to be reenacting Homer's jump over Springfield Gorge does lend credibility to the idea that Obsidian has sustainability ideas worth listening to.

Obsidian has released three games in the 2020s so far: survival game Grounded (we reviewed it positively), narrative adventure game Pentiment (we reviewed it positively), and now Avowed (another good one). Some studios don't even announce a new game in that amount of time.

Among other things not mentioned here, Morgan and Britch's plan also includes building institutional knowledge by aiming for "the lowest turnover rate in the industry" and continuing to release the kinds of games they're known for (player freedom, worldbuilding, all of that) at a consistent pace, "not rushed, but often."

Britch described his vision for Obsidian as a 1973 VW bus with a trunk full of tools and a manual that's being continuously annotated, and summed up the plan by saying that Obsidian is more or less going to keep doing what it's been doing, "not trying to grow aggressively, expand our team size, or make super profitable games." It's aiming for somewhat profitable games, then, made well and at a consistent pace.