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.
Sure, you are welcome to speculate, that is what this is about.
- You mentioned the review situation a few times. I always thought the reason was obvious for doing that. If they are being forced to release an unfinished build, and they know Act 3 is where the holes are then slowing down the reviewers is a strategy for getting ahead of that. Seems to have worked but I don't know why it's relevant, I don't think anyone here is arguing that Act 3 isn't unfinished.
- I don't have data on Starfields demographics or Bg3's demographics - but that is where I would start to make a point that Starfield was a threat to the release of BG3. I am betting the marketing team at Larian would know if this was the case. I only saw Starfield as the last possible contender for GOTY based on multi-platform, long development time, huge resource pool and a company that had made games that won GOTY in the past.
- One of the things I am trying to get at here is showing there was motive, and leverage for Hasbro to be the one to insist on the accelerated release date and that Larian may not be happy with the relationship between them or at least the licensing agreement.
- At this point whether we see another FR game from Larian is going to depend on Chris Cocks being able to sit down with Larian and work out a better agreement.
- The other thing I was trying to show is that Larian has a lot of leverage right now. Hasbro needs Larian more than the reverse. This is GOOD news because it could result in the kind of changes that would allow Larian to develop the platform along the pathways they want. A licensing agreement is a contract that can contain all kinds of restrictions when it comes to development of the property. Larian really wanted that IP and I think that put Hasbro in a superior negotiating position when they first made the agreement.
- Hasbro has clearly struggled to monetize the D&D IP much to their frustration. Explains a lot about how TSR behaved.
*cracks knuckles*
In context to that post, it was showcasing the different ways pushing the release a month early was made for financial reasons. If you know the last Act is shaky, ensuring that you 'get ahead' of reviews and patching quickly is a financial decision. You said both that you saw no reason for Larian worry about Starfield and had enough money to not need to release BG3 early for financial reasons. Clearly, their sales numbers DID matter when it came to the impact reviews might have on it, so the assumption that the other moves MUST be caused by something else like a license agreement or 'just because' independent of Starfield is an assertion with no basis.
I say 'just because' as you previously stated that you saw no reason why Larian would move up the date to avoid Starfield. Now you have apparently done a 180 on your stance saying that Starfield was a threat to BG3. There is no point for you to make here. It is MY point that I made already. Please pick a position and stick to it so I can avoid posting redundant messages in the future.
I know what you are getting at. However, Occam's Razor is a thing.
1) Sven is on record for expecting vastly more
modest numbers from BG3. It makes 0 sense for Hasbro/WOTC to be pushing Larian for a 'win' that the head of the company has no problem admitting they didn't expect.
2) Unless we're assuming both Larian's and WOTC's legal teams are
wildly incompetent to not set expectations for release, and I don't see why we should, you are left with the fact that by law, Hasbro/WOTC cannot arbitrarily cut Larian's time short on the development of BG3 to boost revenue numbers. It makes no sense for them to even ask for it, given point 1).
3) If Hasbro/WOTC had a release date that they needed BG3 out by, that would have been stipulated in the contract from the very beginning. That is how it worked for Obsidian making Fallout: New Vegas, for example as well as other contract work (and Larian would also be paid for it with funding provided). It's been in development for
6 years. You went to a lot of effort of reminding everyone that the current CEO has only been in his position for 1.5 years. There is no 'win' he needs to show, because the agreement was not done under his watch. In fact, Sven said that they would release it 'when it is right' back in
2019.
FL: What is your publishing time frame?
Vincke: We have a time frame we’re looking at, we know people have been waiting on this game for sometime, they will probably will wait a bit longer. We need to get it right, we won’t release it if it’s not right. This is a game we want to play ourselves also, so it’s something we’ve been waiting for ourselves for a long time. We are going to try really deliver on it, we’ll see how much time it takes. We announce now because we to want to talk with the community, really understand what they are looking for, match it against our vision of what we’re doing, then together evolve.
For a bonus round
FL: This is a hugely anticipated sequel, how much pressure is that and how do you deal with that?
Vincke: Well there is obviously a lot of expectations, people have been waiting for this game for a very long time. We try not to think of the pressure, we focus on making a good of a game as we can, our team is very very talented. We have Dungeons & Dragons we have Wizard of the Coast helping us, the collaboration is very close, we also have the funding to do this also without the publisher pressure as we are doing it ourselves. We have all the ingredients to make a really good RPG, we could still fuck it up, but there’s a really big drive and passion within the team to make it really good, more so than what we saw with DOS2. For a lot of the members of our team, their first RPG was Baldur’s Gate. There are a lot of tabletop sessions going on continuously in the offices and the different studios, so there is a lot of drive in this.
This is what we’re trying to do with BG3, the video game is the game master we’re trying to give you as much possibility of doing things just like you would be able to in a tabletop, that’s literally the drive behind what we do.
There was also the announcement that it wasn't leaving EA until
2022 at the earliest since the game needed more time. All signs point to Larian already had the control they wanted over the production side of the project, including the release date. They did their own marketing, their own funding and I don't see a reason why Larian would agree to anything that signs the control they clearly wanted over the project away and less reasons that WOTC would have been in a position to demand it. The 2019 interview includes Merles, the WOTC rep who describes the partnership and it was things like going over maps of the area, lore, classes, etc. Not what engine Larian was using, or game design decisions or milestones.
4) An
IP license agreement has restrictions on the usage of the IP, permissions for how the IP can be used and royalties for using the IP. It would be a strange world where it also crossed over into dictating the development pipeline. Obsidian's contract was not an IP license agreement. They were hired for contract work.
Clearly, something went awry and while you are free to blame Hasbro/WOTC, I would like to make it clear to the thread that this is a position full of holes and given the lack of sources for financial numbers when asked multiple times, it is clear that it is also simply untenable. The simplest answer is that eventually BG3 had some manner of scope creep where they could no longer afford to continue development and had to set a release date, necessitating in hasty cuts and continuing their 'last act-itis' trend with an unpolished Act 3. Manipulating reviews and hoping to patch quickly is a band aid on the wound that is a latter half of the game tripping over it's own feet and being unable to stick the landing.
