1) Sony keeps screwing up, Microsoft manage to make up some ground, and the ridiculous spending splurge they went on this year starts to bring lots of new games down the pipeline. You look a lot more expendable when the company is doing well and there’s five other developers all doing the same thing that you are.
2) The Xbox falls so far behind that Microsoft abandons the console gaming space entirely.
3) The Outer Worlds bombs. Least likely to happen as it’s explicitly being marketed to the Fallout crowd who have far more money than they do sense.

Still, I doubt Obsidian could have survived much longer as a double-A indie since the Kickstarter well was well and truly drying up. They’ll last longer now that they have Microsoft’s money to fall back on, but their fate is no longer their own.

I’ve recently been playing Objects In Space. This is an indie Firefly-esque space game where there is no spoken dialogue, no cutscenes and all of your conversations take place via text delivered by a chunky PDA or email. The writing in it isn’t exactly stellar, but the developers have clearly thought about the world they wanted to create and spent a lot of time coming up with writing that is at least mechanically and thematically appropriate, and so it’s approximately one million times better than Anthem, a game which has had millions of dollars spent on it but where the world has no unifying vision, the plot has been chopped up by multiple reboots and a rushed development process, and I’m 90% sure it’d just be word soup even if the previous two points weren’t true.

Fort Tarsis, the UI and the loading screens maddening. Very nice review.

So if they’re dying then let them die. I’d be happy to see another Dragon Age game but not if it’s designed by cometee released in a financially sensible time cashgrab. The sad thing is that similar story is probably happening to Obsidian. They had a great Pillars of Eternity game and I’m sure Outer Worlds will be good. Same creative talent, huge support from big publisher – they’ve made New Vegas last time it happened. Just like BioWare made Dragon Age Origins and Mass Effect. But after that it’s hard to imagine things not going downhill.