My thoughts on this whole debate:
-Yes, Avowed has some issues, but they certainly aren't that the game isn't a fully functional Eora life simulator with an incredibly deep player choice system, they are more so QoL issues
-No, Avowed is not a flop, it's showing signs of fairly strong sales (top 15 on Xbox player charts from the $90 edition alone and a #1 on Steam where it is beating out Monster Hunter preorders about a week before it's release) in addition to strong Gamepass download numbers
-Yes, Avowed was under reviewed, it was quite obvious that it got hit with Xbox tax, it's more of a mid 80's game than a low 80's game
-Avowed is not AAA and Obsidian didn't want it to be AAA, the dev team size was said to be around 100 people which makes it more of a AA project. Many at Obsidian have said that they have no interest in making AAA games due to the employee burnout that AAA causes. The AAA industry as things currently stand seems headed for collapse and Avowed is probably more likely to make a profit as a AA release than it would have as a AAA release due to budget reasons (game devs in the US are now making on average over $100k per year, a 300 person dev team AAA studio working on a game for 5 years is looking at a budget of $160m from internal developer salaries alone, in addition to external costs [such as mo-cap and voice acting, localization team costs, external QA studio costs, publishing costs] and marketing, putting the total budget of an average AAA game in 2025 well over $200m. At $200m, the break even point for a game is 4m copies sold at full price after storefront cut, and the number of copies you need to sell only goes up from there the higher the budget obviously)
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