Obsidian Entertainment was not expecting such an explosive result for their classic isometric role-playing game with a community funding model… 

At the time, Obsidian was in the doldrums, and not many people had high hopes for Josh Sawyer’s success. He was the director of Pillars of Eternity, and when he came up with the design for the game, there was uncertainty surrounding the project. Sawyer talked about it in issue 404 of EDGE magazine. He believed the idea of a retro CRPG would be successful, but he couldn’t guarantee its success. Feargus Urquhart, then owner (now Microsoft owns the studio) and CEO (he still serves in that role) of Obsidian, was cautious about the idea of crowdfunding… 

“I was actually ready to leave Obsidian Entertainment to do crowdfunding. Still, I thought there was a 50/50 chance that we would get funded in a month. The fact that we got funded in 27 hours blew us away. Other people in the studio were like, “Are we really not going to do this [isometric RPG thing]? If we don’t do it, there’s going to be another studio that does it,'” Sawyer said. At the time, Double Fine had been successful in reviving its older games, and that’s what he had in mind. 

This statement is worth comparing to what we heard in the July 2012 documentary The Road to Eternity: “It got to a point where I said to the owners, ‘If I can’t be a part of it, that’s fine, but we-we should do it.’ You know, that morning, it was, I was hopeful but kind of skeptical, and when it launched and it started getting money, I was like, ‘Oh, okay, cool people are looking at it and they’re giving money,’ but I wasn’t, like I didn’t really perceive the rate at which it was going up. Once we passed $2 million, I was like okay, we’re really making this game and it’s really going to be pretty big,” Sawyer said a decade ago. 

At the time, he found it hard to believe that Pillars of Eternity would make so much money on Kickstarter, but now he accepts it! 

Source: PCGamer