this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2024
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Baldur's Gate 3 outsold its predecessors by an order of magnitude. I think you're overestimating the cultural clout that a game from 23 years earlier carries. Games just didn't reach anywhere near as many people back then.
What they didn’t mention is that Baldur’s Gate is a Dungeons and Dragons franchise. DnD is magnitudes more popular than it was when BG2 released, to the point of being at worst nearly mainstream. What has sold people on BG3 is being able to play their tabletop game in video game form.
I do think Larian’s pedigree and the Baldur’s Gate name were contributors to its success, but if there was one driving factor it’s the brand recognition of DnD with the marketing of an AA to AAA game.
What percentage of BG3 players do you think are/were tabletop D&D players before they played it? Because I'm betting the percentage is very low.
I'd expect the number to be in the low double digits. 10-20% on the total by now. But in the high double digits for pre-orders / early-access and starting the hype train. Say 70%. I haven't met a tabletop RPG player that hasn't played BG3. Though in the more hardcore circles I know there are those that don't play video games at all...
But I can also safely say that DoS players don't account for the success of BG3 since those games never had mainstream appeal. Brand recognition is for sure a massive factor. Also keep in mind that Baldurs Gate, particularly 2, is considered a must play to understand the evolution of western RPGs. While the PC gaming market was much smaller back then so many people will have played it, read about it or wanted to play it but couldn't get past the aged mechanics and looks since then. Its sales numbers belie its influence and reach.
Finally I'd say a good 50% or more of the total buyers bought in after it was apparent that it was going to be GOTY, so many were talking about it and every critic was singing its praise's, but it wouldn't have gotten there without that brand appeal and the super rich and deep lore which the "power users" (like many critics and early adopters) crave.
I agree with you on the percentages, funny enough, and that's why it doesn't explain the game's success to me. If D&D was responsible, there'd be far more people picking up the enhanced editions of the first two games, Neverwinter Nights, etc., and the MMO would be way more popular. If it was 5e, Solasta would have set the world on fire years earlier. I just don't see it as the largest contributing factor when I've seen plenty of examples of people surprised to learn that the game is tied to Dungeons and Dragons after they've already started playing it.
D:OS2 sold several million copies btw. Maybe that doesn't quite count as mainstream, but it was already a healthy increase from what the first game sold, so they were trending up already.
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.