WhenObsidianlaunched the firstGroundedin early access back in 2020, it was clearly a side project. After finishingPillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire, 13 Obsidian employees set to work on a modestly scaled survival game, as the rest of the crew moved ontoThe Outer Worlds, and this Honey, I Shrunk the Kids-inspired survival game was the result.
Coincidentally, there were also 13 developers on the team that madePentiment, the other small-scale Obsidian game that entered development around the same time.
Grounded was an immediate success for Obsidian, bringing inone million players within the first 48 hours of its early access release. By February of 2024,that number had grown to 20 million — and that was before it launched on PS5, PS4, and Switch.
This is a game that was made by a team small enough to fit comfortably in an office breakroom. Yet it performed significantly better than games likeSuicide Squad: Kill the Justice LeagueandConcord. Those big-budget live-service games flopped upon release, despite having significantly bigger teams behind them.
Grounded 2 Shows It Isn’t Impossible To Make A Successful Live-Service Game…
The live-service market presents a Catch-22 for developers. If you make a successful live-service game, it’s a golden goose; a consistent source of money that keeps the lights on and allows for leadership to greenlight risky, interesting games. Sounds good! But, because everyone knows that live-service success can provide that kind of rare stability, many studios pursue it at the same time, leading to the very oversaturated market that makes breaking out unlikely. Sounds bad!
For the last decade, publishers have taken gigantic risks in pursuit of these safe bets. Grounded showed a studio doing the opposite. Obsidian didn’t invest hundreds of millions of dollars, massively scale up, and spend the better part of a decade developing the game. It didn’t bet the farm, it just built a backyard. If it had failed, that would have been fine. This was an experiment for Obsidian, a major departure from the choice-driven RPGs it’s known for making. If Grounded hadn’t worked, it could just go back to making the kind of game everyone expected it to make in the first place. No harm, no foul.
But Grounded did work and now Obsidian has a new bankable series that requires a much smaller team than an Avowed or Outer Worlds.
Wait, What Makes A Live-Service Game?
If you want to talk about how this would work for other developers, we have to address the elephant beetle in the room: Grounded andGrounded 2are only kinda live-service games. They don’t have in-game purchases or microtransactions. Over the course of its five-year run, the first game didn’t add any new DLC packs that users need to shell out for to continue enjoying all the game’s content. If you bought the game, you got all the cool stuff Obsidian added over its lifespan.
But, Grounded and Grounded 2, like all early access titles, are live-games. Obsidian builds them over time in conversation with their community. Upon 2’s early access launch, much of the discussion has revolved around all the secrets Obsidian has included in the game. Grounded was updated continuously, and Grounded 2 will follow the same trajectory. In that way, regardless of monetization, they’re working in the same space as Destiny 2, Apex Legends, and Fortnite — which, you may recall,was in early access for the first three years of its release.
That makes the Grounded games a mix between an old-fashioned multiplayer game — the kind that included all the content it would ever have when you purchased it — and the modern kind of multiplayer game — the kind that receives continual updates to justify the purchase of a season pass. It’s kinda like you’re buying the right to play one of those old-fashioned multiplayer games mid-development.
Whether you consider Grounded a live-service game or not, the series shows a clear path forward for developers that want to make some of that live-service money. Start small. Don’t bet your future on the hope that your game will supplant PUBG. With a small team, you can make something special that doesn’t have to be anything more than it is.
If you build it, they may come. But Grounded shows the best approach means being okay if they don’t.
