Old-school fantasy role-playing game Divinity: Original Sin is Larian Studios' fastest-selling title ever, the developer has confirmed to Eurogamer.
The £29.99 game launched proper on 30th June after a stint as a Steam Early Access title, and has already shifted 160,000 copies. At the time of publication it was the top-selling game on Steam.
It's already approaching profitability, Larian boss Swen Vincke told Eurogamer. Divinity: Original Sin cost around €4m to make, following a successful Kickstarter that raised just under $1m.
"It's doing pretty well," Vincke said. "We're very happy about it. And to be honest we didn't expect it. We thought it was going to do well but not this well.
"It's definitely the fastest-selling game we've ever published. The last figures I saw we were at 160,000. For us that's pretty good. We're definitely going to break even and hopefully we'll make sufficient profit for our next game."
To work out how much money Larian has made from Divnity so far, it's not as simple as taking the revenue from the game then taking out Valve's standard 30 per cent cut.
For Larian, which as a Belgian studio works in euros, its rule of thumb is to take the dollars generated then half that figure it to arrive at a euro amount. So, if a game makes $100,000, the studio makes €50,000.
Divinity: Original Sin costs $39.99. If it's sold 160,000 copies, that's $6.39m in revenue. Half that and we get €3.19m (£2.5m), which means the project is well on its way to breaking even.
Vincke put Divinity: Original Sin's success down to its Steam Early Access and Kickstarter communities.
"The feedback we received from them was worth its weight in gold," he said. "It's almost a co-development between us and them, because they pointed out things we were doing wrong, and encouraged us to expand on the areas we were doing right. As a result you get a group intelligence applied to a game. It's always much better than a single person."
This, coupled with strong word of mouth, is keeping Divinity at the top of Steam's sales charts, ahead of the likes of DayZ and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.
"It's word of mouth that is driving Original Sin right now," Vincke said. "We were late with our game, working on it until the last day, so we don't even have reviews out there. We have exactly two ads we did with the last of our money. It was definitely not marketing doing it."
Divinity: Original Sin Larian Studios' fastest-selling game ever
