this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2024
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I have to assume the blame of losing confidence would have lied more on the publishers stopping funding, not on Sawyer and co.
Larian has had several massively successful Kickstarter campaigns and releases in the genre, proving those concerns wrong again and again. If a developer really wanted to make a great CRPG in all those years, nothing was stopping them. Clearly they weren’t interested enough in it. Of course many of them will now jump on the huge hype train of BG3 and claim they‘ve always been oh so faithful.
That is not to say Publishers aren‘t also to blame of course. It‘s a bit tragic that BG3 was only even possible to become such an elaborate project with a huge investment from Tencent. And I can‘t speak for Larian of course but I don‘t think that was their first choice going by how secretive they‘ve been about Tencent‘s involvement.
But yeah if any dev from Bioware or Obsidian now claims they considered to make a massively huge CRPG like BG3 or anything comparable. As in actually bringing it up during a meeting with execs only to be shut down. I‘d have to call them big fat liars.
"massively successful" in the context of Larian's entries in the Divinity series or even Pillars of Eternity, which moved almost three quarters of a million units in its first year on sale, don't count as successes in the eyes of AAA publishers like EA or Ubisoft. Dragon Age: Inquisition moved more than a million copies in its first week on sale, was Bioware's biggest launch (probably ever, given the current state of the studio), and still barely made an impression in EA's bottom line. In the same year FIFA 12 sold 3 million copies in its first week, and with its Ultimate Team gacha system represented a much longer stream of ongoing revenue than anything a self-contained single player RPG could provide.
Not to mention, deep single-player RPGs are massive undertakings, that appeal to a somewhat fickle playerbase. EA and Activision have demonstrated with FIFA, Madden, and CoD that they can cheaply reskin the same game over and over on an annual basis and move multiple millions of copies each time, without making an effort. Why take a risk on a relatively niche genre where your game could flop because of an off story beat or wonky mechanic, when you can just stick your last megahit in the photocopier and have it poop out another nine-figure megahit?
BG3 is of course a massive success and should be celebrated, but big publishers want to maximize their return on investment, and right now that means wedging live service offerings, loot box mechanics, and micro transactions into whatever genre maintains the most engagement over time. Right now that means multiplayer shooters and sports games.
Oh look, there's Suicide Squad over there. I wonder how it's doing...
But Obsidian launched a campaign for Pillars of Eternity on Kickstarter a mere 3 years after the creation of the platform. As soon as they could, they did.
There is a ~6 year gulf between the point that Sawyer mentions and the creation of Kickstarter during which that option was simply not available.
Well that's the thing though, right, the genre actually literally had a major revival when Kickstarter became a thing. Before Kickstarter existed no one really understood the power of crowdsourcing.
...... How do you use kickstarter before kickstarter exists, tho