"In the Modern Game Industry, Content Is King," Divinity: Original Sin Dev Says

Two months after it launched, turn-based fantasy role-playing game Divinity: Original Sin has sold well over half a million units, mostly from Steam. Chief Executive Officer of developer Larian Studios Swen Vicke said the game has broken even, and is now turning a profit. He credits the game's success to the quality of its content, but says that it would have been better if Larian created it alone.

"In the modern game industry, content is king," Vicke said in a blog post. "It’s a good moment to be a developer, but you have to find a way of doing most of it yourself, without any third party being involved. For each third party you add, your development complexity is going to rise exponentially because you get extra communication lines and there are no guarantees that throughout development, your agendas will continue to match. We had a lot of third parties involved during development, and it was the root of half our problems."

Vicke added that it's better to cut bad content or delay the game to fix it than releasing it, even if it brings the developer to the brink of bankruptcy. "Bad is bad and players will recognize bad. Fix your content first. At some undisclosed point in development, we dumped more than half of what we had," he said. "It was the best decision ever, even if it did tarnish the end result a bit and caused a lot of extra stress."

As Vicke told us in a recent interview, Larian continues to work on Divinity: Original Sin by improving the engine and adding features and extra content to the game. It's also testing controller support to see if a big screen version with cooperative play will work well.

Finally, Vicke said that the studio is currently expanding its development team, and starting up new productions.

For more on the game, check out GameSpot's review.