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One of the rewards offered in the Kickstarter campaign for Kingdom Come: Deliverance is a documentary film on the making of the game. That's still in the works, but developer Warhorse Studios have released an "Epilogue" documentary that follows the final days and hours before the game was released to the public, and the tense time immediately after it went live.
"The release day actually isn't such a big deal for me," creative director Daniel Vavra says in the video, in the days before the game was actually released. He acknowledges that the first week of sales is important, but qualifies that by adding that for big RPGs, the situation is a little different.
"With a normal game you can sell 500,000 in the first week, 250,000 in the second, and then it goes down linearly, so in the end you sell 900,000 and that's it," he says. "But with an RPG it's different. For example, Skyrim is still selling five years after release and still in the top 20 or 30, even if the price is a bit lower. So these games have a longer lifespan, so it can be a bit deceptive."
He admits that he'd be nervous during the first week of sales, though, a point he comes back to near the end of the video when he says that he was worried about how Kingdom Come: Deliverance would sell.
"The preorders—a month ago they weren't all that good. We were thinking, 'Shit!' I asked Swen Vincke how many preorders Divinity sold, only he had Early Access, and he sold an awful lot. So I was thinking, 'Jesus Christ, this is fucked. We can't match that!' But in reality we've almost matched it in a couple of weeks."
The video doesn't delve into the process of making the game as the full documentary promises to, but it does serve as a nice happy-ending coda to its creation. Just be sure to have subtitles turned on when you watch—it's almost entirely in Czech.
Vavra also tweeted today that the Kingdom Come: Deliverance 1.4.2 patch, which will fix "some crashes and a few other issues," is complete and in testing. "I would love to give it to you before the weekend," he said, "but we know how it 'worked' last week, so give us some more time."