Obsidian Entertainment, the developer known for its work on role-playing games (RPGs) like the recent Avowed, has grown significantly under Xbox Game Studios.
That’s according to Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart, who spoke on a number of topics as part of an interview with IGN on Friday.
“When we came on with XGS and Xbox, we were about 170, 180 people [in 2018], and through the course of the last five or six years, we’ve not only grown the studio to about 285 people, but we also have a lot of really good co-dev partners with Heavy Iron and Beamdog,” Urquhart says.
What is Obsidian Entertainment working on right now?
Obsidian Entertainment isn’t the only studio to have grown under Xbox Game Studios, with others like Fable developer Playground Games getting a third studio, while the team working on South of Midnight at Compulsion Games has expanded from 40 to around 100 developers over the last few years.
As Obsidian Entertainment has grown, the studio has worked to keep multiple teams going at once, juggling different projects instead of having the entire studio work on a single game. While a larger team at Obsidian worked to ship Avowed, smaller groups incubated survival game Grounded and the historical murder mystery title Pentiment.
Obsidian Entertainment isn’t done for the year, with another large team now working to ship The Outer Worlds 2 at some point in the second half of 2025.
The studio will almost assuredly have picked a new project or three to work on by the time The Outer Worlds 2 arrives, but it’s not clear yet what that could be. It’s possible we could see DLC packs or expansions for Avowed and The Outer Worlds 2, but beyond that, Obsidian may be a mystery for a bit in the coming years.
In the meantime, if you haven’t played it yet, I highly recommend jumping into Avowed. The spellcasting combat is great, and there’s secrets around every corner, as explained by my colleague Zachary Boddy in their Avowed review.
Avowed is available now across Xbox Series X|S and Windows PC via Steam, the Xbox App, and Battle.net. As an Xbox first-party game, the standard edition is included day one in Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass. The Premium Edition includes a digital soundtrack and extra skins for your companions. For more details, consult our Avowed preorder guide.
