InXile Entertainment - Interview with Brian Fargo on Acquisition

When we look at the so-called 'AA' RPG revolution over the last 5 years, InXile and Obsidian have blazed the trail and been the vanguard. When news of these acquisitions was announced, my gut reaction is that choosing these two companies is no accident. I don't believe we will see any immediate change, and in the short term (over the next 5 years or so), I'm hopeful that we will benefit with some good-to-great RPGs.

My biggest concern, however, was that this isn't due to some corporate strategy or vision, but rather is the brainchild of one person within Microsoft who happens to know what deep RPGs are supposed to look like, and has risen high enough to have some influence to pull this off. And Fargo has basically confirmed this in the interview. The problem is that as soon as that person gets promoted, or moves to another division, or leaves the company, that's when things will start to fall apart. We've seen it happen countless times.

In the end, I do believe this acquisition is a net positive. I think it has delayed the downfall of these two studios by 5-10 years, and given the poor sales of recent titles, their downfall may have been more imminent than we think. But make no mistake: This is still the beginning of the end. I just hope we get a few more decent RPGs out of it before the corporate bureaucracy comes crushing down.

Welp, this merger sounds promising to me. And yea, Fargo already was wealthy, I thought that was pretty obvious. His studio was shown in one of their kickstarter videos. It is located in Newport Beach, which is a very wealthy community in southern California where lots of celebrities and other multi-millionaire types live. It is a very beautiful area, one of my cousins has a small (very modest) beach house there, and we spent a lot of time there in childhood on summer vacations. You can even go on boat tours where the tour guides will point out where many of the current and former celebrities lived in their beach house mansions.

So, thinking he did this only for money I think is not correct. He probably realized that he could either retire, then sit around and get bored eventually, or keep working and having fun in what he likes to do, create rpgs.

Sounds very promising to me, too. InXile make great "old-school type" RPGs IMO, and I think we'll see more of the same but with better polish and even better games overall due to more resources.

Originally Posted by Gokyabgu
One thing is sure, Brian Fargo would be an excellent politician. He says the absolute opposite of what he said 5 years ago without embarrassment. That is the main quality of any politician.

What did he say 5 years ago?

Originally Posted by Fantasm
When we look at the so-called 'AA' RPG revolution over the last 5 years, InXile and Obsidian have blazed the trail and been the vanguard. When news of these acquisitions was announced, my gut reaction is that choosing these two companies is no accident. I don't believe we will see any immediate change, and in the short term (over the next 5 years or so), I'm hopeful that we will benefit with some good-to-great RPGs.

My biggest concern, however, was that this isn't due to some corporate strategy or vision, but rather is the brainchild of one person within Microsoft who happens to know what deep RPGs are supposed to look like, and has risen high enough to have some influence to pull this off. And Fargo has basically confirmed this in the interview. The problem is that as soon as that person gets promoted, or moves to another division, or leaves the company, that's when things will start to fall apart. We've seen it happen countless times.

In the end, I do believe this acquisition is a net positive. I think it has delayed the downfall of these two studios by 5-10 years, and given the poor sales of recent titles, their downfall may have been more imminent than we think. But make no mistake: This is still the beginning of the end. I just hope we get a few more decent RPGs out of it before the corporate bureaucracy comes crushing down.

Well said. At the end of day, it is a business. And it has been hard times on both companies. Hopefully we get to see 2 to 3 great rpgs before microsoft swallows the identity of these companies. It will always happen, sooner or later. I just hope it happens later and we get play couple of great rpgs.

Anyone else wondering about the unannounced RPG? Apparently it was enough to get Microsoft interested, so probably console friendly.

Originally Posted by Morrandir
What did he say 5 years ago?

Did you missed the Kickstarter pitches and countless interviews he made to the press where he said he couldn't make the classic style RPGs because big publishers do not interested with that kind of games anymore. Correct me if I'm wrong. Evil turns to savior all of a sudden?

I'm not sure if I've missed them or simply forgot.

And well, his estimation that big publishers are no longer interested in classic RPGs will perhaps be proven wrong. But that's hardly something he can be judged for?

" Interview with Brian Fargo on Acquisition"
AKA
How Brian & team got their pension lottery win early.

I don't think that the regular InXile employee will get anything like a pension from that deal. If it works out they have a stable job but nothing more.

I understand the optimism but history tells us otherwise. Only classic style RPG that came from a big publisher at this generation I think of is MMX: Legacy, which is an excellent game IMHO but considered a failure by Ubisoft because of poor sales. Something tells me Wasteland 3 will be the only isometric RPG that comes from Inxile in the future.

Probably depends on sales nad MS objective. If MS objective is straight $$ from the studio than yea they will want games more profitable than classic rpg can deliver. If their objective is hooking people into a platform than this might be ok - it isn't a huge number of people but it is more folks buying other services (games) from MS platform.

Originally Posted by Gokyabgu
I understand the optimism but history tells us otherwise. Only classic style RPG that came from a big publisher at this generation I think of is MMX: Legacy, which is an excellent game IMHO but considered a failure by Ubisoft because of poor sales. Something tells me Wasteland 3 will be the only isometric RPG that comes from Inxile in the future.

Everything dies. Everybody dies. It does not make any sense to me how everybody gets sad because these companies will "die" in 5-10 years, as you say. They would die next year, maybe, if Microsoft had not bought them. It's as simple as that. The companies were not in a good time of their financial lives and everything changes all the time. Who cares whether Obsidian will still be good 8 years into the future? I'm glad they will still exist next year.

I survived years when beautiful and colorful backgrounds of Infinity games transitioned into horrible, grey, 3D environments of early 2000 cRPGs. At the same time those beautiful hand-drawn and hand-animated adventure games morfed into horrendous FMV monstrosities.

These last years were great for me as cRPG and adventure games fan. Whatever happens to inXile and Obsidian under the Microsoft ownership cannot change that.

And if Microsoft is interested in InXile because of their VR game experience and in Obsidian because of their Alpha Protocol and Southpark heritage and they will never make isometric cRPG for PC I can at least hope other companies will take over this part of market.

Originally Posted by Silver
Anyone else wondering about the unannounced RPG? Apparently it was enough to get Microsoft interested, so probably console friendly.

Maybe I'm remembering this incorrectly but didn't InXile trademark the ol' Origin game "Autoduel" awhile back? Maybe there's a Mad Max style, post-apocalyptic racing combat game with RPG elements in the works…

Brian's odd vague tweets on BG3 also have a decidedly new potential angle in the light of the acquisition. Hmm. Food for thought.

Edit:
I remembered it right - but who knows what they're going to do with the trademark?
https://forums.inxile-entertainment….ic.php?t=14358

Originally Posted by Pessimeister
Maybe I'm remembering this incorrectly but didn't InXile trademark the ol' Origin game "Autoduel" awhile back? Maybe there's a Mad Max style, post-apocalyptic racing combat game with RPG elements in the works…

Brian's odd vague tweets on BG3 also have a decidedly new potential angle in the light of the acquisition. Hmm. Food for thought.

Edit:
I remembered it right - but who knows what they're going to do with the trademark?
https://forums.inxile-entertainment….ic.php?t=14358

Autoduel would be interesting. Especially with Microsoft resources.

MS is not interested in $$ as such directly but to expand their portfolios to launch their Game Pass. You pay a monthly fee and you get access to games.
Issue for them is to attract other big names and that is not a given because they would earn less by game but could please a lot of indies.
Issue for us is if any Xbox manager launch a hostile takeover to make it an exclusive offer on the Xbox.

Right now the direction of MS is platform independent which is totally cool.

Originally Posted by Silver
Autoduel would be interesting. Especially with Microsoft resources.

Not if it has emergent game-play using an online connection as Fargo hinted before.

Brian Fargo on Becoming a Part of Microsoft GamesIndustry.biz interview.

Life as a mid-sized independent games development studio must be terrifying at times.

Companies like Remedy or Ninja Theory, which make these wonderful, high quality games that are sort-of-but-not-quite AAA projects. Games that are single-player, mostly, with a dedicated audience that isn't quite big enough to justify the big budgets.

We speak to these companies all the time about survival. And it's often about trying new things, being careful with budgets, and always, always, always raising money -- hoping to find that magic hit to take them to the next level.

"It's always been difficult for development companies to become self-sustaining no matter which business model you are using," says Brian Fargo, CEO of InXile.

"At least 50% of my time is in fundraising and we have so little room for error. It generally takes a mega hit to break you out of the cycle and that is always hard to come by. A mid-size hit is nice, but the after-tax monies from that generally support another five to six months of payroll and leave you back on the hamster wheel. It turns out that talented game developers are expensive. My friends always like to comment that I should 'just make a Fortnite or Minecraft'."

More budget = better games. InXile are very talented at what they do but they are a small team and have a razor thing budget, i.e. Brian saying he has zero room for error. I think what they squeezed out of their games so far has been as high quality as we can expect from that environment. Microsoft even giving a few more million and we'd see InXile fully return to form and blow us away with quality CRPGs, IMO. I'm a fan of theirs already and this is going to turn out to be a Godsend to Brian and crew. Long live InXile!