Obsidian Entertainment

What Obsidian Entertainment is

Obsidian Entertainment is an American video game developer based in Irvine, California. The studio works mainly on role-playing games, and its own site describes the intention behind that work as building worlds where players can forge their own stories and experiences that can change with every play-through. In our database the studio is represented by a single title, Fallout: New Vegas, which it developed. That one entry is a narrow view of a longer catalogue, but it is the game we list and the game most readers arrive looking for.

Obsidian is not an independent studio. It sits inside Microsoft's first-party development organisation, announced in 2018 as Microsoft Studios and known today as Xbox Game Studios. That matters in practical ways. Decisions about which platforms a game reaches, when it ships and whether it appears inside a subscription service belong to the parent company, while the day-to-day development work stays with the Irvine team. The studio's own site and the parent company's announcements are therefore the two places where reliable information about the company appears.

How the studio started

Obsidian's own account of its beginning is short and specific. Its website states that in June 2003 five game developers founded Obsidian Entertainment, and the home page marks the anniversary with a series of posts featuring four of the founders. Both the date and the number of founders can be checked directly against the studio rather than through a second-hand summary.

The announcement that brought Obsidian into Microsoft supplies the same year with more detail. Written by Microsoft and published on 10 November 2018, it says the studio was founded in 2003 in Irvine, California, by industry veterans from Black Isle Studios, led by Feargus Urquhart. That single sentence gives the location, the lineage and the name of the person leading the studio, and it remains the primary public record for the change of ownership.

Fallout: New Vegas and the studio's credit

Fallout: New Vegas is the title that connects Obsidian to our database. Its Steam store page lists Obsidian Entertainment as the developer and Bethesda Softworks as the publisher, with a release date of 19 October 2010. The split is worth keeping straight. The studio built the game; another company owned and published the Fallout franchise at the time. Describing the game as Obsidian's own property would misstate the arrangement, and official store listings exist precisely to settle that kind of question.

The same listing names the add-ons released for the game, among them Dead Money, Honest Hearts, Old World Blues, Lonesome Road, Gun Runners' Arsenal and Courier's Stash, and records the age rating assigned by the ESRB. Those details come from the platform holder rather than from the studio, which makes them a useful check on a game old enough that much of its original marketing material has disappeared from the open web.

How the studio is owned today

On 10 November 2018 Microsoft announced its intent to acquire Obsidian Entertainment together with a second role-playing studio, inXile Entertainment. The post describes both teams as continuing to operate autonomously, keeping their own talent, intellectual property and expertise, and counts them among the company's development teams. That announcement is the clearest public statement about what changed for Obsidian and what did not.

What this leaves for a profile is a boundary as much as a set of facts. Neither Obsidian nor its parent publishes staff counts, budgets or revenue in the material a reader can reach from the studio's own site, and the games page there is a portfolio rather than a financial report. Figures that appear elsewhere are not confirmed by either party, so an honest account stops at the founding date, the location, the ownership and the games that carry an official listing.

Games

• Aliens: Crucible
• Alpha Protocol
• Armored Warfare
• Avowed
• Dungeon Siege III
• Fallout: New Vegas
• Fallout: New Vegas – Dead Money
• Fallout: New Vegas – Honest Hearts
• Fallout: New Vegas — Old World Blues
• Grounded
• Grounded 2
• Neverwinter Nights 2
• Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer
• Neverwinter Nights 2: Storm of Zehir
• Pentiment
• Pillars of Eternity
• Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire
• Pillars of Eternity: The White March
• Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords
• The Outer Worlds
• The Outer Worlds 2
• The Outer Worlds: Murder on Eridanos
• The Outer Worlds: Spacer’s Choice Edition
• Tyranny

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