If you read my post, my point was that WotC protects their brands (through faithfulness or something else) because they know they have a reputation to uphold. WotC knows that their large, profitable customer base forms associations about their products and franchises, and will compare future products to past ones. They want to maintain standards and integrity of their games. Larian knows that those same gamers will automatically bring expectations about content and quality of BG3.
Yeah-yeah, that's exactly why WoTC made Tuque Games create the masterpiece "Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance"... auch, sorry, I think I just stretched my sarcasm muscle.
WotC doesn't "make" developers do anything, for one thing. The branding process in general is an attempt to generate revenue and manage risk, not directly control the products. There are no guarantees, and sometimes the decisions are poorly made anyway.
With that being said, their licensing behavior became much greedier under their most recent CEO, and the current upper management group has been diluting the value of several of their primary brands. I doubt many gamers are aware of the game you mentioned, but that is a good example of an attempt to cash in on brand recognition with a poor product. WotC has also begun to sacrifice the value of the brands it owns to market more products. It has its own internal problems with integrity, unfortunately.
The poor quality of the product you mentioned, despite making it through the approval process, should serve as a warning to gamers who might still associate these brands with quality. I think many customers still do, which is why this process is profitable. Eventually, though, customers (like many on this forum who know D&D from editions before 5E) will realize that WotC cannot be trusted to choose good partners, and the brand will lose value. This has already happened to some of their other products.
