Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Starfield is lame - Bg3 is going to win GOTY - Taking bets.

I still wonder what attracted the Dubai call girls scam. This is a rather strange place to spam

All the fetish and polyamorous talk about Halsin? All the "horny" mentions?

Or maybe those crafty call girls just know their audience.

We may never know.

:the answer is below - you were late I had already written the response.

- So Chris Cocks took the reigns of Hasbro in February of 2022.

- Hasbro has a Fiscal start/end of January to December (this is actually not common - companies often have years that end in March or October)

- So Chris has only been in the CEO slot for about 1.5 years. He came from the WOTC digital division and his overall plan is to move Hasbro properties into the digital age.

- He has made some good and bad decisions:

- Bad -The OGL decision was not a good one and I think he realized that. Going after your own free marketing for a few dollars here or there isn't a sound strategy. Enforcement would be a nightmare and it would cause a lot of bad blood. They ended up walking it back - or spinning it into something else. whatever.

- Good - In August 2023 they announced the sale of the Media divisions of D&D, film and TV for 500 Million to Lionsgate. They bought it for 4 Billion. This was a very good decision as they had never made any money here and the whole industry is going through rapid changes, not making money, streaming drama and it's a really risky property to hold onto. Despite being a good decision it was still a 3.5 billion dollar write-off of the value of those divisions. It puts a lot of pressure on Chris to prove his strategy will work.

- Keep in mind, even though they announced it this August, it had been planned and announced by Chris internally for a long time.

- Also Bg3 was released in August 2023 - to rave reviews and to date has made between 500-700 Million in total sales.

- LARIAN holds a license with WOTC/Hasbro for use of the D&D IP limited to Bg3. I do NOT have the details of this license or the amounts that Hasbro is slated to pocket from the sale of the game. I WISH I could get a look at it but it's not public information.

- Chris Cocks stated in August (end of) that Bg3 had made more money FOR HASBRO than its entire movie and tv division had in the last TEN YEARS!! I tried to get a numerical breakdown of what the profit loss for the TV/Movie div did in the last 10 years but I only have guesswork and fragments. They never release what the marketing costs are and that stymies my efforts.

- However, we *think* Honor Among Thieves cost about 300 million with marketing and it made 208 Million at the Box Office. it was pretty quickly sold to all the streaming services - which is what we call a Fire sale - probably because they knew they were selling the division anyway.

- Meanwhile, BG3 had a $100 Million budget, and maybe another $30-50 M for marketing (at MOST) - and is clocking in at 500-700 million SO FAR. It's expected to hit the 1 Billion mark after the Xbox release and within the next year.

OK, and here is the REALLY important part.

- Swen Vinke in one of his last interviews indicated that they were looking at DOS3 for the next game and not to continue the Bg3 story or return to the forgotten realms but it would depend.

- This was a huge bomb going off - for the CEO of Larian to make a statement like this meant they were not happy with aspects of the relationship with Hasbro or the Licensing agreement - or both. And hey, maybe creatively they just *wanted* to return to Rivellon - but this didn't really make a lot of sense to me.

- I think Hasbro may have had time stipulations/penalties in the agreement they had with Larian. Same thing Bethesda did to Obsidian Entertainment over Fallout NV. Obsidian lost a ton of money on a technicality despite making a wildly successful RPG and probably the best Fallout post Black Isle to this day.

- I can't PROVE this 100% - but it's telling that the release was just in time for Q3/End of year sales numbers when Hasbro is down 37% revenue. Chris needed to show - and he has - that his pivot of the company is paying dividends despite the short term loss - but I bet you that release date was REALLY important to Chris and Hasbro.

- But it WASN'T important to Larian. They had wethered a global pandemic that slowed down production massively, so they were WAY off schedule just like everyone else and I can't find a FISCAL reason for LARIAN, in priori, to have made a decision to release the game early.

Short nap.

Q4 is October 1 to December 31.

Both the original release date and the moved up one are Q3 ending Sept 30th.

For it to be 'just in time' for Q4, that means a Christmas sales release date. Which is not what happened so you will have to do some adjustments.

You've forgotten the actual reason games win GOTY. It has surprisingly little to do with how "good" the games are, or how much money was spent on them, they don't have to have high-end graphics (Untitled Goose Game, 2019), or incredible writing (Fornite, 2018), or even be bug free (Skyrim, 2011). For a game to win a GOTY it has to be influential. This is not always the easiest thing to quantify, because it relies on analysis of the goddamn zeitgeist, which is getting harder to do each year with how quickly trends roll over. But even then, what I said before still holds, different companies judge how influential games are differently, and it's rare for one game to top everyone's lists.

To put it simply, BG3 will probably win a GOTY award, because it's been one of the most influential games of this year, it has sparked many conversations about and within the industry by powerful and knowledgeable people, conversations about early access games, about the growing reliance of the industry on post-release income generation which continues to upset consumers, and about sex and sexual content in video games. Knowledge of the game reached beyond the normal video game sphere of influence, so that people not even associated with video games were talking about the game (thanks, bear sex). It's only one of a bunch of games that have all released this year and received high critical acclaim (according to metacritic), but it's easily one of the most well-known.

Fixed, I meant to say Q3/End of Year to Q4. It means he can show positives on the balance sheets for both quarters and end the year on a positive - way more impact especially since you have to do investor calls at each Quarter and the end of year one. More impactful when you can say we had these losses for this half of the year but these gains for the latter half of the year.

Baldur's gate 3 might win because it's rather late for anything else to make waves. Nonetheless, it's a sad day when not having microtransactions and a technical ending in the game is revolutionary. At least it's got inspiring games to consider turn based combat on its side, ironic as this game winning for *combat* is upfront. For my criticism, I can't help but think it will be near forgotten in 5 years. There is no DLC potential, no proper modding tools, no story that sticks with you. It came with a bang, like a firework show, and is equally as short-lived if noisy.

You also gave Larian a fiscal reason. The game was in development for 6 years and was funded by Larian and the early access sales. They have every incentive to release a game 'good enough' upon running out of money.

I wouldn't be surprised if it wins Best RPG or something at Game Awards or other outlets. I'm expecting DICE at least to give the top award to Tears of the Kingdom though.

Although I am curious who are these 'powerful and knowledgeable people' and if you can give me any links? I always take such things with a grain of salt as, you know, DoS 2 was foretold to revolutionize RPGs by critics when it came out and it didn't happen. I'm also not sure what conversations about early access games you are talking about. PUBG: Battlegrounds was nominated and won awards as an early access game back in 2017. I am also fairly certain the bean counters with the data have been saying all there is to say about the reliance on post-game income generation and the trend line of live service games for years now. Bear sex, I'll grant you.

That's also very much a case of 'Thanks, I hate it' for me personally, lol

I can find no indicators that suggest Larian was running out of money. If you look at the yearly revenue against the budget for the development of the game, they had plenty of cash on hand through 2023 - even before the sale of Bg3 they had 12 Million in revenue plus easy access to streams of credit if they needed it, plus the extra money from EA sales, plus a warchest from DOS2 that they came into development with (around $400 million or so).

Oh and another chunk from the Tencent deal, but I don't know how much that was. Although they didn't allow that stake to be sold for cash as much as access to China.

Revenue is not profit. 12 mil per year for 6 years is 72 million which is a 28 million deficit against a conservative 100 mill game budget not including marketing if we assume pure profit, which we shouldn't be. Do you have a source for the 400 million number?

12 Million was just 2023 - the annual revenue was $110 million per year based on sales from DOS2 or roughly $600 million. There are simply no indicators that larian was struggling financially here. I've looked, but they didn't take on any new debt, they didn't sell assets, or lay off employees, or shutter studios.

1) 110 mil from DOS 2 is impossible. It made 85 mil in revenue the year is was released. https://gamingbolt.com/divinity-original-sin-2-made-85-million-in-revenue-according-to-superdata#:~:text=Divinity%3A%20Original%20Sin%202%20Made,In%20Revenue%2C%20According%20To%20SuperData

I have no idea why one would think making more money off DOS 2 each following year from the one it came out in is reasonable.

2) I looked for 2022 and 2021 revenue numbers and it was estimated at 12 mil with median revenue per game at 9 mil https://vginsights.com/developer/12015/larian-studios The only place 110 mil is found is for 'currently' in 2023 which accounts for BG3.

3) You said they had a warchest of 400 mil from DOS 2, Source?

4) I will correct an assumption. Larian does not have to be broke and begging for their to be financial reasons in releasing a game early. They moved up the date of release to avoid Starfield. That is an early release for financial reasons alone. You can still release a game early due to running out of money, but not have to take on debt because you responsibly projected development costs and released early so you would not have to do that. Lack of debt or closing studios and finances running too low to keep BG3 in the oven for 6 more months to a year are not mutually exclusive.

I'm not on twitter, which is where this all started, so most of this information is coming from secondary sources.

The original IGN broadcast. Informative, but inflammatory.

PC Gamer article that links to comments made by other game devs, and the discussion by Xalavier Nelson Jr.

Game world observer article that links to the friends per second podcast and quotes Sven directly in his response to the issue.

video by Escapist Magazine which briefly covers both sides of the issue in a thoughtful (and mildly silly) way.

You could also check out YongYea, who covers video game trends and industry news, and has covered the issue.

As for the issue of early access, all I can give you is information that people have already echoed in this thread, that some gamers view early access games in a negative light, due to the perception that it is effectively a "soft release" of an unfinished product, or that the company is outsourcing pre-release testing to the public, and making them pay for it at the same time. I don't think it's a big discussion by actual game devs at the moment, only by regular idiots like me. I personally don't think BG3 was one of those games that treated early access like a soft release, even if i think they could have done things differently.

That’s not actually what was said. Swen said Larian would at some point return to Divinity, but never said what the next project would be.

More recently, Larian said they were interested in doing more work in the FR, but it’s unclear whether that’s a new game or DLC.

I haven't watched the IGN video but so far this is mostly commentary on online discourse rather than insider information on how the industry itself was taking it? Several are from before BG3 even released about the twitter comment. No offense, was expecting something more substantial about how BG3 made those in the know recalculate anything.

Most recent estimates put the number sold of DOS2 at 7.5 million copies - across all platforms - which would put it at around 450 Million total revenue. Again we don't have exact estimates - nobody does because this is a private company and they don't have to report to investors.

The high revenue stream over the years makes sense if you look at how staggered the platform releases were for DOS2. See below:

Windows - 14 September 2017 - 1 Million copies in 2 months.
PlayStation 4, Xbox One - 31 August 2018
macOS -31 January 2019
Nintendo Switch 4 September 2019
iPadOS - 18 May 2021


https://www.eurogamer.net/larian-on...ew-era-and-games-youve-never-heard-about

So we have to go with how Swen reports in interviews, and this one from two months ago he said that DOS2 sold 3 x as many copies as DOS1. It would be great if they released these numbers though.

There is also the TenCent deal which brought in a large amount of money for them as well - although again i cannot speculate on what TenCent paid for the 30% ownership stake to get a seat on the board. It was probably quite a lot.

Did Larian make a statement saying they were adjusting their release date to get in front of Starfield? I understand that is what people assumed but I can't see a good reason for them to have done that. The teams exhausted themselves to try to hit that date with a decently playable build. Understanding what was going on financially at Hasbro seems to me to make more logical sense - but again this counts as speculation to a certain extent.

I don't dispute that, but he was SO vague about what the next steps were - and even mentioning Divinity - holy shit he may as well have been writing "we need to renegotiate that license" across the damn sky. We MIGHT return to Divinity? WHAT?!

If he had said "We can't wait to work with WOTC on the next D&D project" I wouldn't be saying anything, but to even mention Divinity original Sin in a Bg3 release interview. That shits not subtle.

Could be a hardball negotiating tactic. Swen hustles and is scrappy as fuck. Wouldn’t put it past him.

It still doesn't make sense as you are making several questionable assumptions.

The first is that DOS 2 was selling for 59.99 on all platforms for all six years, which is easily debunked as there are sales, games come down in price if your name is not Nintendo, and on the Switch it was 49.99 and IpadOS it sold for 24.99 on their releases. Mac App store 44.99 and by that release there was a sale for 29.24 on Steam. https://www.macrumors.com/2019/01/31/divinity-original-sin-2-definitive-edition-for-mac/

The second is, again, that it would sell more at the 59.99 price point on each successive platform release than it did on PC each following year. The price point we can already dismiss due to the former argument and the second is highly unlikely because by your own source, it sold over 10% of it's total sales in the first two months. For reference, you are claiming DOS 2 made almost as much for Larian Studios as The Witcher 3 did for CD Projekct the year after its release, EACH YEAR. https://www.cdprojekt.com/en/investors/financial-summary-report/ PLN to Dollar is 132 mill in 2016 following The Witcher 3 May 2015 release. And that game sold roughly 50 million copies in 5 years which is 2.5 million more each year than DOS 2's total estimated sales of it's lifetime.

Secondly, which number is it exactly? 450 mil or 600 mil? And no source for that warchest of 400 mil?

I am not sure why you don't see a good reason for avoiding Starfield. Games and movies released too close to other ones can hurt their sales; see the Honor Among Thieves DnD movie getting squished in the box office by the Mario movie. Blizzard's Overwatch 1 open beta singehandedly merc'd Battleborn. This is proven and as you said, they worked hard to meet the date as is already. Why not stick with the date they originally had? That wouldn't have caught review outlets with their pants down as it was confirmed that review copies were sent late in relation to the new launch date, preventing reviews or preloads until release.

If we go back to reviews I noticed IGN France gave Baldur's Gate 3 a 10 and Starfield a 9.

Maybe Starfield is better in French.