How many copied did Larian sell of their first game?
Divine Divinity: 500,000 - 1,000,000. Solasta: 200,000 - 500,000. Not really a useful comparison though. When Divine Divinity was initially released neither steam nor GOG existed. I would guess most of its sales were CDs and none of those sales would be shown in those figures. The total number of people who played games back then was also smaller, so comparing an audience from a game back then to a game now isn't something you can feasibly do. Also, these games aren't even in the same genre, so its like comparing a racing game to a puzzle game. The market was also less diluted though, so people had less to choose between. There are also other variables like the fact that the one was released 20 years ago and the other was only released now which muddies the water and the fact that Divine Divinity had a publisher to advertise for them and Solasta did not. Or how about the fact that Solasta is able to appeal to an audience which is attracted to a specific ruleset (the D&D ruleset) whilst Divine Divinity as an original IP could not. As you can see, trying to make a comparison is a little pointless.
Assuming you were asking non rhetorically however, there are some figures.
Originally Posted by kanisatha
Steamspy "data" is not particularly useful, imo. Firstly, it obviously leaves out a lot of other ways in which people may be buying their games. But even taking it to represent Steam sales data is highly flawed because Steam uses ranges of sales, 200k to 500k, 2m to 5m, etc. And then people conveniently latch on to the high end of the range and claim that is the sales number. So for BG3 EA, for example, if it falls in the 2 - 5 m range, BG3 fans of course want to claim the sales figure is 5 m which is quite ridiculous. At best I would say it is likely sitting right at 2 m.
Steamspy is very useful. The data from it is used by a lot of publishers as well as developers to make a case for whether or not there is a business sense in making a specific game. Considering that, last I checked, Steam makes up 90% of the sales on PC its very close to a monopoly and using sales data from Steam is probably fairly accurate. Those ranges are there to provide a (from memory) 95% confidence interval and the data is not provided by steam, it is extrapolated via things like achievements data. Its highly unlikely the sales figures exist outside of that range. Trying to make assumptions like, "BG 3 is at 2m and Solasta is at 500,000" is a misunderstanding of the methodology used to extrapolate that data to begin with. Its also misunderstanding the use case of this information.
