So even if we were accept that people who would prefer a more faithful port of D&D ruleset are a niche market - and they are not
This is an assumption. Prove it. I will wait, since you cannot. The entirity of Husbro (the owner of WoTC, as well as a number of other companies) is valued at ~12b USD. Of that, WoTC is only a fraction. The largest part of WoTC is Magic: The Gathering, it is not D&D. When WoTC was bought out by Husbro, it was bought for ~325m USD. Even if we estimate today it to be worth ~1B USD, my point still stands, as only a fraction of this (and a fraction smaller than 50%), is made up by D&D. For comparison, Minecraft sold to Microsoft for over 2 billion $ and it is a single game. Just recently Bethesda was purchased for 7.5 Billion. In comparison to the number of people who play games on either a PC or Console, the number of people who play any tabletop game at all, be it D&D, Pathfinder, or anything else is tiny. Of those people who do play tabletop, how many of them do you think care that a port is 100% faithful. I would hazard a guess and say, not all of them. Probably not even most.
To the contrary, you have simply repeated your point about 'niche' without acknowledging any of my points. One of my points -- one backed by evidence -- is that devs do indeed cater to vocal minorities.
They cater to vocal minorities when what the vocal minority wants does not go against their core design pillars. There is a very active vocal minority in Path of Exile which has been asking for an auction house since the game first released, its been 8 years or so now and they have not only been told no, the developers have written very long essays explaining why, in detail, they will not add one. Maybe, just maybe, if a development team is not entirely opposed to implementing something then it gets included into the game.
If you are saying that feedback on the forum has
no chance of influencing Larian you are making a far more sweeping critique of the Early Access model than I am willing to make at the point. I'm taking Larian's offer at face value. "You pay for early access, help us quash some bugs and by participating in the forum you have a chance of influencing the final outcome."
If you were right and
[the] game that Larian is trying to make is obviously not driven entirely by popularity or even by feedback from a focused group, but by what they want to make.
Then EA is a sham and the promise to listen to feedback is meaningless hype -- I don't believe that. I'm not willing to go there yet.
I didn't say that, I just said that the type of feedback they likely find valuable is not the type of feedback many people are giving. The evil path is actually a very good example of this. Saying, "I dislike this game because I want to roleplay as an evil character," tells them exactly why you do not like it, it does not tell them how to go about implementing one. This is useful feedback for them, because understanding why someone dislikes your product helps a great deal in going about addressing the dislike. An analogy to explaining how would be you, as a player, writing your own fan fiction evil path and then expecting the developers to implement that. This is similar to much of the mechanics based feedback which has been given, which is very much, "this is how I want the mechanics to be," and not, "this is why I dislike the mechanics." This is, I suspect, why they commented on the dislike of missing (not something i personally mind at all), because the feedback surrounding missing was focused all on the why and not so much the how. I can give lots of examples of how you could "alleviate the strain of missing," for example counters, but this was not the type of feedback which was provided in much of the missing discussion.
As for the market I think we already have good reason to believe that the market is something other than the typical gaming market -- the extra sales are not coming from DOS fans but from people who tune into critical role and people who loved BG. Indeed I only played DOS when I heard Larian got this contract.
The extra sales are likely coming from the heavy marketing and pr campaigns the game is running, this game has featured almost everywhere, from stadia, to the recent apple unveiling, to gaming conventions, etc. Skyrim or Diablo 3 have both, on their own, sold more than D&D 5e. These are both games which have a similar target audience to BG 3. There is
some increase in sales from the tabletop fanbase, but you would be absolutely deluding yourself if you thought that most of the sales would be coming from anything other than the gaming market itself. The gaming industry is valued at ~90 billion USD. Its the 4th biggest entertainment industry in the world. Tabletop games are not even in the same ball park as it, they are sitting outside somewhere on the street, looking in jealously.
Also, count me allergic to elitist appeals like "people don't know what they want". If you decided to come here and share your opinion it's because you have one and that goes for both the l33t and the hoi polloi. *Beams with pleb pride*
The people who I have seen making this argument so far on this forum are those most strongly in favor of 5e, "we know the system the best, clearly our opinion is the most important, random purchaser will buy the game anyhow - A few, unnamed 5e purists." Glad you are not in that boat, but best to make sure.
Now we do agree that it would be nice to have better communication. And I want a poll of the forums so we have a better sense of the numbers.
It more or less confirms exactly what I said in terms of what the forums want. Here was my comment on said poll.
The Literary Digest Poll conducted in 1936, polled 2.4 million people and predicted Landon would win. In reality, Roosevelt won. The results were not even close to the prediction either. The irony is, it is 1 of the largest polls ever conducted and yet as a result of a sampling bias it was not representative of the population.
I don't need to create a survey to tell you that the majority of the controversy on this forum is about how faithfully the D&D rules are adopted as well as well as whether or not the rules are RtwP vs turn based, you can tell that just by looking at the threads. This survey tells you nothing we don't already know about this forum, which is my point, the forum is not representative of the game's population, in fact, its not even representative of all the people who read the forum, its only representative of those who respond. At no point did I assume that the people who were responding were trolls, I know that for the most part, the people responding genuinely held that opinion, I am just pointing out that this survey isn't useful for Larian, because we know that its biased to begin with and that for a player its only real purpose is to be incorrectly used as an argument point.
The problem with the survey is the problem I keep repeating, over and over again. The forum has a very clear and obvious sampling bias.
