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Microsoft completely misjudged Baldur’s Gate 3
(www.polygon.com)
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this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023
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Baldur's Gate 3
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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)
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You do have to look at it in some context tho.
As seen in many of the documentation, these documents were from 2020 and even earlier.
At that point, BG was set to be a decent game, but still being done by a small studio and far from finished. For a normal company, the development and production time for the game was stretched so long it was doubtful that it would see completion and if it did, it would probably be rushed.
Instead Larian got enough backing to finish it.
Besides, traditionally, that style of RPG is a niche market that does have a rather well defined target audience, but not an especially WIDE audience.
The fact it broke out of its niche and got such wide appeal is in fact not something you would've guessed.
But even with the needed context, the wording they used was rather harsh, to say the least.
And all of this is because Microsoft execs, or almost any exec, cannot even judge the market they are in properly. They only understand once the money starts coming in, after the selling data is compiled, and then claim it was impossible to predict. They have 0 foresight and imagination. They just cannot fathom a new game can be successful if someone involved hasn't already succeeded to the same level. They don't understand progress and cannot see signs of a good product if you don't tell them how much it sold.
Look at the product, not just the previous financial success. Look at the following (YES kickstarter success IS A GREAT SIGN IT WILL SELL). Look at the actual fucking game they are making since you had three years to check it out before. But they don't because they don't get it, they don't understand their own market. They, like always, based their entire opinion on past financial success and some arbitrary "niche market" they invented anyway. The market is much, MUCH wider that this. Every single gamer in the world plays a wide variety of genres, that is not what makes a game succeed of fail. The quality of them is.
Nobody who looked into BG3 before had doubts about this game's quality. Hell a lot of us are not here because of DnD but because Larian already made extraordinary games in that genre.