145
Microsoft completely misjudged Baldur’s Gate 3
(www.polygon.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023
145 points (92.9% liked)
Baldur's Gate 3
6314 readers
152 users here now
All things BG3!
Baldur’s Gate 3 is a story-rich, party-based RPG set in the universe of Dungeons & Dragons, where your choices shape a tale of fellowship and betrayal, survival and sacrifice, and the lure of absolute power. (Website)
Spoilers
If your post contains any possible spoilers, please:
- Use the text [SPOILER] at the beginning of your title, do not include any spoilers in the title.
- Use the appropriate spoiler markup to conceal that content in the body of your post.
Thank you!
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Honestly. This is a fine look for Microsoft. This is inside baseball executives trying to make sure the lineup on their game pass platform is appealing to people throughout the year. They're going to make bad predictions, but they're not doing it out of spite or evilness, they're just trying to maintain engagement in their game pass.
You would see similar discussions behind any other subscription platform. Did they underestimate it sure, but their job is to predict, so they're going to have to make good estimates and bad estimates.
When you constantly miss though…
Where’s the good estimates? That’s the concerns people are having.
The issue isn't THAT you missed. It's WHY you missed.
That's kinda like saying an engineer builds good bridges and bad bridges.
Ok, not that, but it's still their job to get almost all predictions at least CLOSE to right, so this is the definition of failing to do their job.
Maybe, but most prediction based jobs have a middling success rate.Missing this big is always significant, but not catastrophic in this case.
When you have a history of failing and than you go and call Crosby second rate. It is actually quite catastrophic, it proves (again and again) that they have zero idea of the market they are in.
I guarantee that at least some of them would have been fired if they made the same magnitude mistake in the opposite direction, though, and unless they have specific safeguards to avoid overestimate that aren't in place for underestimates, they WILL.
I don't think they did a bad job at all. They wanted to have a lineup to keep their users engaged. If they underestimate one, even significantly, they still succeed because they insured they had a lineup to keep their users engaged. They're hedging their bets.
Not to mention lorian, themselves underestimated the success, because overestimating causes more problems. And lorien and Microsoft negotiator rate for game pass.
You wouldn't happen to work in PR, would you? Because the way you keep insisting on focusing on something completely irrelevant to the criticism while still briefly acknowledging the criticism as an aside is actually quite dextrous and would probably work on a lot of people 😄
Nope. I'm working against the thesis of "not a great look for Microsoft" the op posted.
I'm very much glad bg3 is a huge success, we need more RPGs with depth and impact. I'm just not convinced in this circumstance MS is the boogyman.
Not in this specific situation, but their repeated failures should maybe tell them that their view on the market is incorrect.
History keeps repeating itself with them.
Physics aren't quite as fickle as people's tastes.