There has been much debate about whether or not Outriders has been a hit or not for Square Enix. The publisher certainly seemed excited about its performance at launch, though People Can Fly just reported that it had not been paid any royalties for last quarter, meaning the game had not made back its production and marketing budget. This led to a big debate about Game Pass availability potentially hurting sales, but also this was a game that was deleting players’ loot for about a month, so suffice to say there could be a lot of factors. But what I found interesting was some wording in a patch preview this week that seems to indicate there’s more to come from Outriders. And not just bug fixes and balance patches. Actual new content, and possibly a true expansion.“It is worth mentioning that, as our patches to date have and are continuing to address most of the bugs that players may have experienced, our teams are beginning to shift more focus towards working on and implementing much requested new features and content.”We’ll talk more about this New Horizon, as well as the other Outriders related things we’ve been working on, in the near future.”So, this is one of the only times I’ve seen them talk about new content outright, as buffing and nerfing things is not “new content,” so that means something would have to actually be added to the game. And given that Outriders is trying not to be a live service, I don’t think that means something like an Outriders holiday event or something. I think it means…new content. Also of note is the section where “New Horizon” is capitalized. If they had simply said that without the capitalization, I could have dismissed it as a turn of phrase. But that seems like a purposeful tease, like the possible name of an expansion. Though I suppose “Outriders related things” could be anything, a comic, an animated short, who knows. But hopefully it’s game stuff. Previously, when I asked about the game’s future plans, here’s what People Can Fly had to say:“This isn’t a games-as-a-service, but if people like it, we will definitely be doing more things in the Outriders universe. We have so many more stories to tell, and a lot of ideas we want to explore that we couldn’t fit in the original game, so we’re happy to create more content in the future. Anything we would make would be in the form of significant expansions with self-contained stories.”It’s no surprise that this was kind of the plan all along, whether they wanted to call themselves a live service or not. And honestly, even if we’re debating the game’s current profitability, I would not be shocked for an expansion to get greenlit off the back of the initial interest alone, where the game got 120,000 players on Steam, 4x what Square Enix’s Avengers got at launch. And even struggling looters like Avengers and even Godfall have gotten expansions.
All data is taken from the source: http://forbes.com
Article Link: https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2021/08/20/outriders-is-now-teasing-new-horizon-a-possible-content-expansion/
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