Recently, Obsidian Entertainment head Fergus Urquhart spoke with Jason Schreier of Bloomberg.
Last year, the studio released three games — Grounded 2, Avowed, and The Outer Worlds 2, but the latter two did not meet the sales forecasts set by Microsoft.
Fergus clarified that this is not a failure, but the studio decided to reconsider its approach to budget allocation (they are looking for ways to reduce it), and they also intend to speed up game development:
This is not a catastrophe. I would not say it was a "punch in the teeth." It is more like: "This sucks. What can we learn from this?".
According to the head, Obsidian Entertainment intends to use outsourcing to speed up development.
Another way to reduce development time is to "use the same technologies more often across different projects":
We do not need to radically change everything every time. We have argued internally more than once: do people really care that we spent another hundred person-months on the inventory screen?
Obsidian does not plan to release three games a year; developer Josh Sawyer shared his view:
Spacing out releases over time helps the company allocate resources wisely and avoid exhausting employees. Releasing three games in one year is bad. That happens when something goes wrong.