Baldur's Gate 3

Of all player deaths, 12% were caused by friendly fire. Nice spellcasting there, Dave!

I feel attacked.

For what it's worth - I work in the AAA game industry. Every AAA game collects those kinds of metrics, even "singleplayer only" ones.

They answer a few questions:

• Are things too strong and the player is dying too much? Too weak and the majority of players breeze through difficult sections?

• Are players getting lost/stuck? Are there softlocks or progression blockers?

• Where do players stop playing the game? Can we work out why those areas are more likely to stop playing?

• Are players going to certain areas? Are important areas being skipped? Are areas without a lot of content seeing more traffic than expected?

• What kinds of builds are players trying? Why are they playing those builds? Do they change builds midway through? Why?

• What NPCs are the players talking to? How do they interact with those NPCs?

• What do gamers do over the course of the lifetime of a game? What do hardcore passionate fans like? What do casual players like?

These sorts of data points are really critical for things like future patches or DLC. They help point out the places in the game that need love and adjustment going forward. (For example, how many people romance Karlach vs. Shadowheart? How many people go for the Underdark vs. the Mountain Pass? How many people investigate the Creche vs. skip Gith stuff entirely?)

For example - in a game I worked on, we saw a spike in players quitting the game at the section where they needed to crouch for the first time. This meant either crouch wasn't being taught well, crouch controls weren't intuitive, or something broke. A subsequent patch changed the crouch tutorial and the spike of players quitting went away.

Every single moment that is spent working on the game has a cost. The job of production is to ensure that development resources are spent in places that give the biggest bang for the buck. Places like the tutorial or early missions are super duper hyper important because 100% of players will see them. As things diverge, fewer segments of players see them - some players quit entirely, while others commit to one section of content over the other. You want to figure out where "most" players go and focus there, only moving down once those areas are fixed.

For example, 1/3 of players choose evil. So 1/3 of the time should be spent on the evil path, because why invest 75% of resources into something that 66% of players won't ever see? You still need something there, but when you need to make decisions, production (and publishers!) only drive decisions based on data.

Community feedback is biased. The loudest minority are the ones who choose to give feedback online. These are players who are highly invested in the game, much more than a "typical" player. But they represent a relatively small chunk of the player base - 5-10%, on the high end - and not a representative sample at that. While community feedback is important (and does drive many decisions, if only to make sure the Internet doesn't get mad), it isn't "good enough" for dev teams to focus on it exclusively. The numbers guys work in numbers, not sentiment.

So the data basically is used to say "Look: players are romancing XYZ more than we expected. We should invest more resources into making sure that their romance is rewarding" and if that's true it's likely that production will greenlight some dev time to work on that.

It can also be used for "Hey, players are seeing framerate drops in these areas, consistently. Can we have a patch that improves framerate here?" and production will balance that against everything else (how many more sales will be made by raising the quality bar and fixing the framerate in this spot?), create tickets, and triage them out for a future patch.

Then if Larian works on Baldur's Gate 4, data from Baldur's Gate 3 can help drive decisions. Should the dev team invest resources in a better character creator? What areas are really resonating with players - and how can a sequel replicate that? What areas were more disappointing than the dev team expected, and how can they be fixed? (For example, the devs seem surprised that the community has rejected Giths as much as they have - this isn't too surprising from the outside looking in, but it's easy to be blinded and lose sight of things like this when you work on a project for 4-5 years with dev goggles on.)

This is all super duper common data to collect, on any game. I wouldn't read too much into it; Larian is just being more open than most by sharing selections of that data with the community.