this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2024
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They don't deserve that much for it (Larian does)
Some percentage of revenue for using other people's IP is pretty normal.
And I think it's hard to argue Baldur's Gate and using DnD isn't a meaningful part of its success. Divinity Original Sin 2 is a really good game with a lot of the same DNA (it's why I personally bought BG3), and it stayed pretty niche. The IP is a big part of it exploding.
I'd argue it had far more to do with it being another one of Larian's RPGs with significantly more production value.
I wouldn't have touched it without Baldur's Gate being attached.
You're underselling how massive the Baldur's Gate name is.
The exact same production in DOS3 wouldn't have near the same runaway hype train.
Baldur's Gate 3 outsold its predecessors by an order of magnitude. I think you're overestimating the cultural clout that a game from 23 years earlier carries. Games just didn't reach anywhere near as many people back then.
What they didn’t mention is that Baldur’s Gate is a Dungeons and Dragons franchise. DnD is magnitudes more popular than it was when BG2 released, to the point of being at worst nearly mainstream. What has sold people on BG3 is being able to play their tabletop game in video game form.
I do think Larian’s pedigree and the Baldur’s Gate name were contributors to its success, but if there was one driving factor it’s the brand recognition of DnD with the marketing of an AA to AAA game.
What percentage of BG3 players do you think are/were tabletop D&D players before they played it? Because I'm betting the percentage is very low.
I'd expect the number to be in the low double digits. 10-20% on the total by now. But in the high double digits for pre-orders / early-access and starting the hype train. Say 70%. I haven't met a tabletop RPG player that hasn't played BG3. Though in the more hardcore circles I know there are those that don't play video games at all...
But I can also safely say that DoS players don't account for the success of BG3 since those games never had mainstream appeal. Brand recognition is for sure a massive factor. Also keep in mind that Baldurs Gate, particularly 2, is considered a must play to understand the evolution of western RPGs. While the PC gaming market was much smaller back then so many people will have played it, read about it or wanted to play it but couldn't get past the aged mechanics and looks since then. Its sales numbers belie its influence and reach.
Finally I'd say a good 50% or more of the total buyers bought in after it was apparent that it was going to be GOTY, so many were talking about it and every critic was singing its praise's, but it wouldn't have gotten there without that brand appeal and the super rich and deep lore which the "power users" (like many critics and early adopters) crave.
I agree with you on the percentages, funny enough, and that's why it doesn't explain the game's success to me. If D&D was responsible, there'd be far more people picking up the enhanced editions of the first two games, Neverwinter Nights, etc., and the MMO would be way more popular. If it was 5e, Solasta would have set the world on fire years earlier. I just don't see it as the largest contributing factor when I've seen plenty of examples of people surprised to learn that the game is tied to Dungeons and Dragons after they've already started playing it.
D:OS2 sold several million copies btw. Maybe that doesn't quite count as mainstream, but it was already a healthy increase from what the first game sold, so they were trending up already.
An order of magnitude with the difference of volume of game sales over time isn't the giant improvement you're portraying it as.
It wouldn't have worked without a quality team, but Baldur's Gate is every bit as much of a behemoth IP as something like DOOM. There's a reason they worked so hard to get it. It's sure as hell made them a hell of a lot more than the 90 million cut they gave Hasbro.
An order of magnitude is an order of magnitude. It's the same size no matter who portrays it. If you're comparing sales, it's always a huge difference. Doom, in the 90s, reached as many people as BG3 did today. That's largely because of the shareware model at the time, but that's how big BG3 is, and BG1 and 2 were nowhere near that. Speaking anecdotally, the thing that attracted me to BG3 had nothing to do with D&D and everything to do with the CRPG formula finally catching up to the production value of dialogue systems from games like Mass Effect, which are typically found coupled with a compromised RPG format, so being able to get both in one package has a lot of appeal.
An order of magnitude doesn't mean anything when the market is much more than an order of magnitude larger.
If you don't know for an absolute fact that the primary reason that BG3 pushed Larian past niche into a blockbuster success is the IP, you don't know what you're talking about. It's not even sort of ambiguous. The IP was all of the hype. The quality is just why the hype turned into GoTY.
It does, because who are you selling to if 90% of your audience never heard of the original thing?
You don't see anything wrong with you asserting the opposite? It's not even sort of ambiguous? Yes it is! lol. The only way to prove otherwise would be to time travel back to 2017 and revoke the IP from Larian. D:OS2 already sold significantly more than its predecessor, and word of mouth was almost surely going to make their next game sell more than that too, and it turns out things like performance capture help to really pull people into a story-driven game. Most people who picked this game up probably couldn't even tell you that Baldur's Gate was a city and only knew that it had two previous iterations because this one has the number 3 in the title.
You don't have to have played BG1 or 2 to be aware of the new game exclusively because it's the third.
Again, literally all of the hype was about Baldur's Gate. Larian was barely mentioned, way down the line, when people eventually got around to "who's making it anyways?". It wasn't even close to the primary driver.
It also came with massive built in world building and mechanics that are better than DOS2. They effectively didn't even have to design the gameplay. They just had to do the story telling.
As I recall it, much more hype came from a squirrel witnessing sex with a bear.
I would agree that it being DnD was part of its success but I still don't think Hasbro deserves 90m for it
But they got a percentage, would you have been happier if they only got ten million but a lot leas people bought the game? Idk what deal they had, however the game was great and a lot of people loved it. And so hasbro got a lot of money, this will hopefully encourage them to lease out more IPs.
I'm a recent D&D fan, largely because of BG3. What's the tl;dr for why people hate Hasbro and Wizards? Hopefully a slightly longer explanation than just the word "greed".
Jan last year they were going to destroy the 3rd party D&D content creation ecosystem (it was legally debated whether they could anyway) it caused a mass boycott of D&D content and all 3rd party creators (including Critical Roll) to start diversifying. It went on for two weeks, only finally causing them to rollback on it because a campaign to cancel all ongoing D&D beyond subscriptions made them take it seriously.
They've been pushing to make a closed garden platform vtt for all their first party digital content, that it seems they've just started to rollback on.
Prior to that they've been consistently milking and trying squeeze the D&D playerbase and MTG community in more and more shitty and exploitative moves.
To say that community good will and faith in them is below zero is not an exaggeration. The main hardcore community have a very jaded and negative view of Wizards and Hasbro. Really to learn more I recommend crawling through YT of all the news. There's just no way to do it justice here.
Full disclosure: I've never played dungeons and dragons so I'm probably not the best person to ask, I've just kinda followed the story after playing bg3
My understanding is that since its creation, DnD has been "open source." Anyone could make content for the game...like campaigns and maps and stuff and it was fine. A lot of people credited that policy with the success and proliferation of the game - I don't know if it's true but I believe it since a lot of my exposure to it has been creative projects.
Last year, Hasbro (who owns Wizards of The Coast who owns DnD and Magic: The Gathering) was going to change* that policy so they get a cut of the sale of said content. Pretty much everyone hated this and it got walked back.
Gotcha. If that's the extent of it, that's not too bad. Thanks.
I dunno, a corporation taking a huge open source project and putting a pricetag on it feels kind of bad to me. I don't care that they have a fee for licensing to big companies (which they had already) but the policy change would have been a big deal for small or independent creators
Yeah, but I'm not going to hold it against them when they backed out on it. I would not be playing Street Fighter 6 right now if Capcom went through with their initial licensing changes, but for similar reasons, they didn't. So for now, it's cool. In situations like this though, you just have to be ready to leave at the drop of a hat if they misbehave.
Fair enough. I think it's reasonable that people were rubbed the wrong way that Hasbro even considered it
I don’t know much, but I heard Hasbro has fired all the guys who created D&D (after they bought the licence). Those guys helped a lot Larian during BG3 development (Larian even tried to speak about them when they won at the Game Awards, but were cut off before they could).