Drakensang Online - Interview, "Too few people bought Drakensang"

They also worked on smaller games - but the DS market crashed.

Dwagginz said:

But you can argue that dtp, as the publisher, didn't help the cause at all.

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Yes, a lot of fans are bitter about that.

The interesting thing is, that a head of dtp said in an recent interview that they wanted or even "had" to expand into the international market, to get the costs back, because the German market alone was so (relatively) small.

And THEN they didn't market games outside of Germany that much.

To bitter fans this is nothing but double-speak.



More or less related (but on Adventure games, and from 2005) : http://www.gameboomers.com/interviews/dtpkellnerinterview.htm
It sheds some light in the internationlity of adventure games.
(This interview is in English.)

There is a scaling argument.
Assumption - If x sells for $D in Germany, then it will sell for n x $D internationally.

Did DS 1 sell a lot more than DS 2 in Germany? If not, why did they sell DS1 internationally in English but not DS 2?

Alrik, are the "DSA is selling very well" data from Germany only? Or did the RPG system succeed in its English version, too?

Elwro said:

Alrik, are the "DSA is selling very well" data from Germany only? Or did the RPG system succeed in its English version, too?

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The lack of TDE material is either due to poor sales or because no one is pushing it.

Hint: It really looks like it's the latter.

There is lack of TDE material? As in 'new' material? In Germany? I didn't know.

Thrasher said:

There is a scaling argument.
Assumption - If x sells for $D in Germany, then it will sell for n x $D internationally.

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I've read a statement by a local publisher that nowadays a German game should make close to 90% of its sales outside of Germany. (He didn't mention the much lower earnings per unit though.)

Another interesting piece of info:
The German PC market is almost exactly as big as the US PC market.

Did DS 1 sell a lot more than DS 2 in Germany? If not, why did they sell DS1 internationally in English but not DS 2?

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DraSa sold at least twice as much as DraSa 1.5. If not more.
dtp didn't sell DraSa internationally. Their partners did. It's impossible to say from an outside perspective whether dtp demands too much for the interntaional RoT rights or whether the prospective partners demand such a low price that dtp is not willing to accept it.

Elwro said:

There is lack of TDE material? As in 'new' material? In Germany? I didn't know.

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The books sell out within a short time. Then you can only get them on ebay for ridiculous prices.

Oh, I forgot to clarify. I was talking about the English language releases (Which are labelled The Dark Eye) rather than the German ones (Which are Das Schwarze Auge). I use TDE to refer to the English rather than the German.

Gorath said:

DraSa sold at least twice as much as DraSa 1.5. If not more.

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So the expectation is that DS 1.5 would make about half as much as DS 1 internally as well. Seems like that would have been enough to keep most happy...

Gorath said:

The books sell out within a short time. Then you can only get them on ebay for ridiculous prices.

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Yes. This is exactly what currently happens with TDE pen & paper role playing material = books.

A TDE international market regarding pen & paper products ( the blog entry I linked above talks of nothing but this ! ) is practicall non-existent. No-one ever did something for it within the last decade. The only exceptions were the basic rules and a few adventures that appeared in English around the time of the introduction of the 4th edition.

Wanted to push this up ... because I'm interested in opinions on that by those who are playing it right now ...

Lot of speech about the ruleset and TDE world, but do you think that Dragon Age was success because the ruleset?

Alrik Fassbauer said:

Wanted to push this up … because I'm interested in opinions on that by those who are playing it right now …

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If you refer to the TDE ruleset, people are not interested because it's too similar to old D&D, while being more complicated. Plus, the magic rules were never released in English, which made the whole English release kind of pointless.

If you meant Drakensang: River of Time, it's only known by insiders. Games that get only released for PC have a hard time in the US, anyway. At least if the publisher is not Blizzard.

Alrik Fassbauer said:

Wanted to push this up … because I'm interested in opinions on that by those who are playing it right now …

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I didn't knew all of that, too few sells, bankrupt, and death of the series.

It's quite sad but the reasons aren't obvious. A first point is I think the spread released with delayed release in some countries is a difficult art to master. I feel it's an erroneous approach because it diminished a lot the effect of the game release.

I'm sure they had very good reason to do that but it's still not a good approach if you don't have a powerful com army at your service in different countries to support and push separate and delayed releases.

The second point is it's just too ambitious for a first game team. I think the team behind is important and its fame can help a lot a game release. So a game mainly pushed by a dev team should not be too ambitious for the first game of the team. The point is to built first an aura of fame among the fans before attempting something more ambitious with a much bigger cost.

The comparison with DAO is extremely difficult because it's just too different worlds, even if the games have a quite close approach and also if obviously Bioware borrowed some of the best idea.

A much more pertinent comparison is The Witcher. Here too we have probably a too big target for the first game of a dev team. But beside to be very well achieved and despite probably a bit more significant flaws than Drakensang, they achieved some singular design points making the Witcher a quite unique game in the whole RPG history. Drakensang only targeted a very solid design with no flaws and many good points but also nothing so unique beside the use of the Dark Eyes background and rule set.

Clearly has already stated here the Dark Eyes isn't really a marketing argument apart in Germany, because even if in past it got a good distribution in some other countries, in all those countries this trademark has just disappeared during too many years and the old fame has mostly vanished in those countries.

So it ends with a solid RPG with many good points but no amazing characteristic or singular feature that the marketing could exploit well, for professional or for fans. On this base, a too ambitious budget that should have stick to German market base to build some fame first. Also I'm not sure it's a good idea to target German language for first games of a team, English language seems a lot more pertinent, I wonder is this would really killed the game in Germany if the game had a mood and feel of a sort of mildly indie game.

More and more computer gaming is looking on how making games with much lower budgets and Drakensang is to be add in the stacks of example that big budgets are a difficult approach.

I know that all of that is pure arguing and this could be part of the main causes of the final failure, or not, or pure bad luck, or anything else.