What's going on, everybody?
this time bringing you a blog about the state of King Maker on consoles, as well as why it will likely never be fixed. Now, this is not a blog I was really expecting to make. However, we got the actual answer as to why King Maker is so rough on consoles in a somewhat unexpected way, and I figured it was worth mentioning to talk about it because it's something I didn't know, and I imagine a lot of other people didn't either.
But to give a little bit of background to this, kingmaker was the first game from Owlcat Games, of course, the first big Pathfinder CRPG that we got and a bit of a cult classic in a way.
It's a very good game that can be kind of frustrating and it has a lot of positives and negatives, but ultimately it led us to Wrath of the Righteous.
However, while these are typically PC games, they do have console ports, and the King Maker console port in particular is known to be in very rough shape. You can start the game relatively fine.
But unfortunately, the farther you get into the game and things like your save file getting bigger and bigger can cause a lot of bugs and a lot of people have trouble finishing the back portion of the game where it can become almost unplayable.
But as I mentioned, the studio went on to make Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous, which has seen tons of support updates, post launch fixes, that type of stuff. So, a lot of people, especially with Wrath of the Righteous just recently releasing on consoles, have been wondering what the deal is with Kingmaker's situation. Why was this game never fixed? Why can't we see some of the things from Wrath the Righteous and Kingmaker?
And I admit this is a question I personally have been a bit curious about. And recently in a Reddit post, we got the rather simple and straightforward answer, which is quite surprising.Owlcat doesn't own the rights to Kingmaker anymore.
According to their community manager over on the Pathfinder Kingmaker reddit, they're allowed to talk now about this, which I'll get to that in just a second. But basically, Owlcat Games split from their parent company in 2019 to become an independent studio. I'm not 100% sure who was the actual parent company, but I'm going to guess it was probably Coke Media or Deep Silver, which is their public label, given that that's who published Kingmaker. But that's just a guess. Honestly, I'm not 100% sure.
And if you want to take that a little farther, I think Coke Media is actually owned by THQ Nordic as well. So typical corporate layers of nonsense. But the long and short of this is that due to that separation, Owlcat Games lost the rights to their game Kingmaker. They do not own it, which means that they just straight up can't update the game at this point.
However, while that is a pretty straightforward explanation, it at the same time does leave me with a few questions, because and this is where we start to get into the more corporate aspect of it, the last update for Kingmaker was I believe in May of 2021.
And at least in this recent reddit post that revealed this information, it seemed to have been implied that owlcat no longer makes any money off of King Maker, that they don't actually get any of the profit from the sales.
which brings me to the last part of this, which is entirely speculative because we have no information really about the specifics of this. But if I had to guess some of that, and the fact that Owlcat had not previously revealed this information means that there was probably some agreement in place that OWLCAT and his parent company were tied to that probably expired somewhat recently, given that we're suddenly getting this information quietly in a reddit post, or more specifically, a reply in some reddit posts.
And that kind of agreement isn't uncommon, especially in these situations where these companies will part ways and essentially sign an agreement saying that they will not discuss the details for a set period of time, usually in the ballpark of two to three years.
And given that 2019 was three years ago, that would check out. That's a common type of arrangement that I dealt with previously in a sales job where you would have that situation with salaried employees when they would kind of be effectively laid off.
Oftentimes they would be just presented with Severance in an NDA. And this strikes me as somewhat similar to that, but admittedly, again, purely speculation, no clue when it comes to specifics. And if there is such an agreement, I imagine it would detail why OWLCAT was releasing updates for a game they apparently didn't own the rights to for two years in May of 2021. To sum it up in a very simple and straightforward way, you won't see any more updates to King Maker, especially on the console side, simply because Owlcat no longer owns the rights to that game according to their community, CM. So there you guys go. Hope you enjoyed the information. By all means, let me know what you think about this down in the comments section below. But regardless of any of that, truly, just thank you for reading. May you wander in wisdom and have an amazing day.
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