As Fergus said, Obsidian is living under the gun. I'd rather they stay independent than join with the dark forces of EA, but if they can be sold to Bethesda; everyone wins here. Obsidian can live a life free of financial duress, they can continue to work on their previous IP and occasionally work on Bethesda's IP, and Bethesda would be further emancipated to create their own IP instead of swirling down the Fallout-TES vortex into the abyss of video game banolity.

From Soft is a relatively small team, and likely are never going to be buying other studios.

Their publisher is Bandai Namco, but I don't really feel like that would be a good fit for Obsidian.


Zenimax seems like a much better bet.

Yes I very much like the idea of Zenimax buying Obsidian. I would love to play a tes spinoff made by them. New Vegas was great and brought in a lot of money for them, not as much as FO3, but it was substantial. My 2 favorite games by them are New Vegas and KOTOR II. Man, I hope this really happens. I know it's been every NV fans dream to have a collaboration between the two and make a new FO. With Obsidians writing and BGS world building that game will be awesome.

Could be wrong, but I could have sworn fallout new Vegas sold more copies then fallout 3.

According to the steamspy.com website the PC version of Fallout 3 sold 2.2+ million copies while the PC version of Fallout: New Vegas sold 4.4+ million copies on Steam.

So yes, Fallout: New Vegas sold more copies than Fallout 3, at least on PC.

It's not as cut-and-dry as you think. NV has higher numbers on Steam because it's been a Steam-only game since launch. FO3 wasn't; you could get it at retail with the caveat being that you needed to have the disc in the drive for it to work, and all its DLCs were initially sold on Games for Windows LIVE. It was also available on a number of other services besides Steam, like Direct2Drive. So yeah, NV is going to look like it sold more on Steam because it's been concentrated there, while FO3 has been more spread out.

Fallout 3 used Games for Windows Live for DRM. New Vegas used Steam. No surprise New Vegas sold more on Steam.

VGChartz tells a different story where total sales are concerned.

According to vgchartz.com the physical boxed version of the PC version of Fallout 3 didn't even sell 1 million copies it's at 0.98

Yeah, you are right about the PC sales. I was looking at total sales across all platforms.

I don't much like Bethesda games anymore, mostly personal hang ups centered around different preferences. But I've liked several of the games they've published like the new Doom and Dishonored. Obsidian would be a good fit for them IF they managed to treat them better than how things were handled during New Vegas' development.

Might be good for Obsidian but not so much for Bethesda/Zenimax. They already have enough RPG devs and AAA titles, and I doubt they would want to fund the isometric crpg niche that Obsidian can bring to the table and BGS can't.

Besides, the Obsidian package comes with a proven hysterical base of followers who have been very rude and ungrateful to Bethesda, I see this as an unnecessary complication.

They only have two RPG development studios, one of which was created just for MMORPGs, and the other of which (BGS) is only releasing games every 3+ years. I think there could be room for more RPGs at Zenimax.

Edit - Oh, maybe there's another one, now that I think about it - BGS Montreal. Still a little fuzzy on what they are/will be doing though.

Man, this is so true. They make the Morrownd fanatics look tame.

A rabid fanbase is true of both sides. If anything though, I would love to see Bethesda collaborate with Obsidian on a Fallout game. With both company's strengths involved in making the game, this would-be Fallout could be very engaging, I'm sure. I would rather see Obsidian in the hands of Zenimax, seeing as how some other publishers have too much say in a game's development process. (*cough*EA*cough*).

I have come to the conclusion that a game's worst enemies are its most rabid fans.

Fallout 3 was available as standalone retail game so those 2.2 million will not be accurate for the PC.

If gamesas had such intentions it would have materialized long ago I think. Obsidian's struggle with studio size vs budget safety is not new.

I'm still miffed at Beth for a crappy FO4 game, however, I'd rather them take over Obsidian than some crap group like EA or Capcom. I respected Capcom a lot since I grew up with their games. After their stunts, no more. Bethesda is ticking me off, slowly losing me as a consumer.

This is pretty much true of all fan bases...especially when it comes to their presence on the internet. I never understood the notion that customers owe a company gratitude, though. Isn't spending money on their product enough? Shouldn't the company be grateful to have customers?

"Rude and ungrateful to Bethesda," You mean critical of a over-hyped company that has made a string of poor decisions over the past decade?

I really don't think that tons of game sales over the last decade qualifies as poor decision making. Bethesda being in the black seems like good decision making to me.


That's like EA games. I don't like them or how they do things but I cannot deny the fact that they are successful.

Good decisions are not solely synonymous with good sales. If that were the case Activision and EA would be without question the best publishers; which is questionable considering the franchises they've collectively ground into dust and the litany of banol games both publish.

I'm surprised so many are willing to heap so much praise on Bethesda, a publisher that totally left the Fallout fanbase in radio silence for about 5 years; engendering such a desire for information that people started to cling onto misinformation when there was no information to satiate them... Pete Hines could have very easily dismissed all of the pre-reveal rumors but he didn't. Bethesda Softworks is a great publisher, but being in the black doesn't negate the very obvious and egregious decisions they have made.

It depends on whose perspective you're looking at it from. As a business, if your products keep selling well, it's hard to come to the conclusion that you're not making good decisions.

There can be really good reasons for this. I think that not revealing information about a game/software release until feature lists, etc. have been finalized can be a very smart thing to do. Sometimes this doesn't come together until later stages of development, so I wouldn't necessarily knock BGS for being tight-lipped about Fallout 4 for as long as they were. Releasing info about features, release dates, etc. and then wanting to change things later can be worse for PR than saying nothing at all.

You can't dismiss what's ultimately true; the release of Fallout 4 proved that the script that had been leaked nearly two years before was completely legitimate. Besides, every sequel to every major franchise spawns countless rumors; no PR guy can even begin to hope he can tackle every single one that comes up. Hell, up until the moment Skyrim was announced, a lot of people were convinced TES was dead in the water.