Divinity: Original Sin launched a few days ago and so far it seems to be doing very well for itself. It's the fastest-selling game Larian Studios has ever published, and studio boss Swen Vincke told Eurogamer that it's definitely going to break even and might even pull in enough profit to finance Larian's next project. As for what that might be, he said the team still has to figure that out.
The success that Divinity: Original Sin has enjoyed, from the Kickstarter that pulled in more than twice its not-inconsiderable goal to its move to the top of the Steam charts following its June 30 launch, seems to have caught everyone by surprise, including Vincke. "We're very happy about it. And to be honest we didn't expect it," he said. "We thought it was going to do well but not this well."
More than 160,000 copies of the game have been sold, Vincke said, driven primarily by positive word of mouth. Reviews are in very short supply at the moment because the studio continued working on the game until the last possible minute, and the total marketing effort put into it was just "two ads we did with the last of our money."
Larian is now working on a hotfix and a major content patch, and extra content for Kickstarter backers is also in the pipe, but Vincke said the studio doesn't actually have a plan beyond that. "We sleep and then we're going to have a party and then we're going to sit together and figure out what the next game is," he said.
"Nobody believes us but we really don't have anything planned. This was all in for us. This was part of our plan when we started to go independent, that we'd make the biggest RPG we could with what we had in terms of money, and then we'll see what comes out of it," he said. "So we went all in. We have to pay back our debts now, because we made a lot of them. It looks like that's going to happen. And then we will see."
Vincke did tease one possibility, saying the studio is trying to pick up the license to an existing RPG franchise that he declined to name. The current rights-holder didn't respond to initial inquiries but with Divinity: Original Sin successfully out the door, he's hopeful that the next attempt will be more productive.
