A recurring trend in The Discourse about why Deadfire performed badly, commercially, is the examination of Steam Achievements for the first game. This type of analysis is not unique to Deadfire, but it exposes some confirmation bias when you compare it to competitor titles.

First, it's true that less than half the people who played Pillars I (through Steam) completed Act I, and only 13% completed the game. RIP in pieces. For later comparison, For a first time player going at a normal pace, Act I takes 4 to 6 hours to complete.

Some argue that despite getting great press reviews / good user reviews, this mean players *actually* didn't like it and the idea of making a sequel was inherently stupid because look at the stats!

The problem with that conclusion is that those sort of stats are not uncommon.

These are the stats for Divinity: Original Sin EE, completing an early area quest and the entire game. If 13% completion suggests that you should not make a sequel, certainly 10% would be an even worse sign - but D:OS2 was a phenomenal breakout hit.

These are the stats for Pathfinder: Kingmaker. PF:K has a 7 Act structure, so it's hard to do a direct comparison, but let's use one of the first big quests you're supposed to complete, then the end of the game. This is the lowest completion rate of the three, with 7%.

Owlcat did a Kickstarter for their next Pathfinder game and it's made a ton of money. A 7% game completion rate clearly does not mean the community collectively did the Klingon discommendation ceremony on the studio and the series.

All of this is not to defend Pillars I or Deadfire as games, on their own or relative to competitors, but to say that the argument that achievement stats indicate people hated the game, and THEREFORE the decision to make a sequel was inherently bad and wrong, is not sound.

I mean, the most commercially successful game I've worked on, Fallout: New Vegas, has a 47% completion rate for They Went That-A-Way, which is a rough Act I completion analogue. It's within 1% of Pillars 1's Act I completion rate. Also the game sold over 12 million copies.

I think it's perfectly fine to argue that I'm dumb, we're all incompetent, the games are bad for various reasons, but the Steam Achievement completion rates are very much in line with similar games.

I've said this before (recently, in fact), but most people don't finish games.