Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Early access for GOG

Two reasons:
1. Valve provide a proven infrastructure to support the availability of a developer's product, along with MP features and various "engagement" APIs.
2. More important, Valve provide a developer with access to, perhaps, 200M people that are pre-qualified as being videogames players. In sales/marketing terms, these are "pink" customers that are known to buy what you are selling, compared to "blue" customers that are unknown random people. Typical conversion of a blue customer ( from, say, broadcast advertising ) is < 5%; it is much higher for pink customers.

Valve simply copied the 30% take that Sony and Microsoft charge developers for access to customers of their consoles.

There have been various challenges to the amount Valve take. For example, EA stopped releasing their games on Steam years ago because they didn't want to pay 30%, and they have Origin, but likely lost many sales because of that choice.

Since late last year, EA returned with their games to Steam. This is most likely a result of Epic Games setting up their games store with a much lower percentage take, which forced Valve into reducing their charge for high-sales games.

Edit: Buying on GOG also involves a fee, it is not free.

Yeah, I think it takes a bit more to properly distribute a game.

The Larian Vault website used to have a storefront to sell the Divinity games. While this avoided distributors' cuts, it also had additional overhead in terms of servers and bandwidth for the game and patch distribution, an extra step when releasing updates to create patches, and extra QA time testing a separate game version and the patches.
In 2015 there was a change to the tax laws in the EU for digital goods, which made it no longer feasible to run an independent storefront, and that feature of the site was shut down.

Out of curiosity, how do Larian deal with MP features when delivering to multiple digital platforms? Do you use your own cross-play layer, or do all players need to use the same platform?

With D:OS1&2, each platform version uses that platform's multiplayer API, and on PC there is Direct Connection and LAN for Steam / GOG / App Store multiplayer.
For BG3 there should be details about multiplayer announced closer to EA/release.

Supporting GOG feels great, they are the most friendly game distributor by far. Steam is a huge mess, every time I install something from them, can't wait to finish it and remove the whole platform asap.

I don't know what kind of Early Access this will be, but based on previous titles (Divinity OS 1 & 2), Larian will finish this game, instead of keeping it EA "forever" as many do on Steam. So I would buy it at full price already, on GOG, if it's released earlier. Looks like it's a game I want to play, though maybe won't have time next months, so won't be a problem waiting for full release. Every Larian game I bought on GOG so far, gave updates for free, so they really deserve an early buy, especially for a game like this.

You know it’s Larian who worked on D:OS1&2 and updated it, not GoG. GoG is just a distribution platform.

The Enhanced/Definitive Edition updates were free on Steam and (for D:OS) the App Store, as well.

Speaking about Early Access, it's August (̶m̶̶a̶̶y̶̶b̶̶e̶) (definitely).

There are no system specs whatsoever posted yet either, perhaps they will delay it all.

Yes of course, those were all thanks to Larian. Sorry for not being clear.

Right, so ignoring consoles, MP uses a player PC as host instead of a public server, allowing you to connect any other PC player you can reach.

I suppose that could be extended to include Stadia players for BG3, but would probably not be using Stadia to best effect.

Thanks.

I hope they delay. The last demos were far from playable, even for early access and they were from a month ago.

Far from playable? As someone who plays Madden, BG3 is definitely playable

I dislike Steam and typically only play a game there I picked up at a discount from Humble Bundle or Indiegala. Everything else is on GOG (OK, I do have free games from Epic). My entire Divinity collection is on GOG. What I like about GOG is that I can play the game anywhere and don't have to worry about an internet connection. With GOG, the game will synch up later if I've lost the internet connection. I also like DRM free stuff; it's a major PIA to wait for Steam to confirm everything (especially if it's been a month or more since I played anything there).

I really do hope Larian gives GOG users EA, but if they don't, here's my question:

Can I buy BG3 during EA on Steam and then get my key (when the game launches 1.0) for GOG?

I'm thinking the answer will be 'no' as they'd then have to send Steam keys at launch to everyone who's in EA on Steam and who wants to remain there. One of the beauties of EA is that the game can be updated on the user's account at the time of retail release.

Unfortunately, I think many who prefer GOG will wind up waiting until retail release. As a result, Larian will miss many data points. I know Larian did use GOG for EA of DOS:2, but they may have had problems, which would explain why they are only offering Steam. I'm not even thinking about Stadia as that belongs to Google, and Google tends to mess up whatever they run. They've recently messed up YouTube where you don't get notifications anymore on the gmail account.

I prefer GOG as well and I'd rather wait than be forced to buy it on Steam.

As a side note, what I don't understand is why the game is being offered everywhere else except Epic. I know that there's a lot of hate towards Epic, but I didn't expect a major studio like Larian to buy into it too. Isn't the major beef against Epic about "denial of choice", yet your not letting the consumer choose Epic if they want? Incidentally .... I'd choose Epic over Steam. Also, Epic gives the studio a bigger slice of the pie, while Steam skim 30%.

As for Stadia .... we don't even have it here.

They put it on steam first because this is where they will get the broader audience they need for EA. As well, they have done that in the past with DOS so they must have all the infrastructure ready to gather data as well for BG3. I am pretty sure if they had time to set things up properly they would have reached other platforms. But it seems BG3 development requires all the resources they have so they chose the easier path for EA release.

Because Epic is owned by Tencent and Tencent has ties to the Chinese government.