this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2024
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An order of magnitude with the difference of volume of game sales over time isn't the giant improvement you're portraying it as.
It wouldn't have worked without a quality team, but Baldur's Gate is every bit as much of a behemoth IP as something like DOOM. There's a reason they worked so hard to get it. It's sure as hell made them a hell of a lot more than the 90 million cut they gave Hasbro.
An order of magnitude is an order of magnitude. It's the same size no matter who portrays it. If you're comparing sales, it's always a huge difference. Doom, in the 90s, reached as many people as BG3 did today. That's largely because of the shareware model at the time, but that's how big BG3 is, and BG1 and 2 were nowhere near that. Speaking anecdotally, the thing that attracted me to BG3 had nothing to do with D&D and everything to do with the CRPG formula finally catching up to the production value of dialogue systems from games like Mass Effect, which are typically found coupled with a compromised RPG format, so being able to get both in one package has a lot of appeal.
An order of magnitude doesn't mean anything when the market is much more than an order of magnitude larger.
If you don't know for an absolute fact that the primary reason that BG3 pushed Larian past niche into a blockbuster success is the IP, you don't know what you're talking about. It's not even sort of ambiguous. The IP was all of the hype. The quality is just why the hype turned into GoTY.
It does, because who are you selling to if 90% of your audience never heard of the original thing?
You don't see anything wrong with you asserting the opposite? It's not even sort of ambiguous? Yes it is! lol. The only way to prove otherwise would be to time travel back to 2017 and revoke the IP from Larian. D:OS2 already sold significantly more than its predecessor, and word of mouth was almost surely going to make their next game sell more than that too, and it turns out things like performance capture help to really pull people into a story-driven game. Most people who picked this game up probably couldn't even tell you that Baldur's Gate was a city and only knew that it had two previous iterations because this one has the number 3 in the title.
You don't have to have played BG1 or 2 to be aware of the new game exclusively because it's the third.
Again, literally all of the hype was about Baldur's Gate. Larian was barely mentioned, way down the line, when people eventually got around to "who's making it anyways?". It wasn't even close to the primary driver.
It also came with massive built in world building and mechanics that are better than DOS2. They effectively didn't even have to design the gameplay. They just had to do the story telling.
As I recall it, much more hype came from a squirrel witnessing sex with a bear.