In the late 90s and early 2000s the gaming community was just starting to explode. Most games didn’t have the hundreds of millions of dollars in their budget like today. It was a smaller base of developers with smaller budgets.
So back then, you didn’t need a million is sales to make it big. Now you do because the costs of producing a game has gone up exponentially.
BG1, BG2 and NWN1 were all big successes for the era. You have to put in context of the time. NWN2 was a modest success because the gameplay and story just wasn’t as good as NWN1. BioWare was the big fish at that time so gamers were a bit disappointed when they didn’t make NWN2.
Gamers also tend to have brand loyalty. Look at all the Larian fans here. So obviously when BioWare came out with Dragon Age, it became a massive hit because it had all the hallmarks of a good BioWare game, namely a good story with interesting characters.
Oblivion wasn’t obscure. At that point Elder Scrolls was a major franchise in computer RPGs. Morrowind was a success that continued on to Oblivion. And to their credit, Bethesda to me started the “living world” trend we see today in open RPGs. They set the trend (along with Rockstar and GTA). And by 2011, gaming was mainstream so now games garnered millions of followers.
You have to look at the history of gaming to put it all under perspective.
So why no D&D games for like a decade? Answer 4th edition. 4E was specifically designed with computer gaming in mind. Problem was, it sucked as PnP so it had no audience. The irony is, it’s because it had a system similar to cooldowns.
