I think you guys are overlooking the biggest factor of all: it is a D&D game. By multiple accounts there are now around 15 million people worldwide playing 5e D&D. For years and years after the release of the final expansion for NwN2, the legions of D&D fans were, on every single RPG gaming forum, bemoning and griping about the lack of a *quality* D&D videogame. All through much of the 3.5e years, and all of the 4e and 5e years, we got extremely few D&D videogames being greenlit by WotC, and those very few games were all universally crap. So when finally we get a D&D videogame, and it is in the highly popular 5e of D&D, and it certainly meets any D&D fan's minimal threshold for what is a *good* videogame, then those 15 million D&D fanatics are going to jump on to that bandwagon wholesale. You add in at least 1-2 million additional buyers who are *not* D&D fans, for example people who are fans of Larian and/or the D:OS games and/or RPG fans generally, then you end up with huge sales numbers. The key, though, is that you are starting out with a built-in fanbase of 15 million, a fanbase that is literally desperate for and crying out for a decent D&D videogame, and where satisfying the craving of that fanbase does not take a whole lot. That's BG3.
This, btw, is also why someone else trying to replicate BG3 sales numbers won't work out for them, because BG3 was in a very unique position. Even those legions of D&D fans are not going to jump on to a future D&D videogame the way they did BG3, because they have now received their "good D&D videogame" fix. So another gane like BG3 won't move that needle much at all. I suspect Larian/Vincke understood this, and that was a big part of their decision to move on to something else entirely different. They have gotten all they can possibly get out of making that big D&D videogame the D&D fans have been pining after for years.
Last edited by kanisatha; 10/10/24 04:40 PM.
