oh dude nice!

...plays BG3 for the thousandth hour

I'm interested!

eww. paywall. gross. here:

Baldur's Gate 3 has been a huge success since it was launched last year

John Mulligan

The holding company for Belgian-controlled games studio Larian, which runs its revenue through its Dublin arm, posted a €249m pre-tax profit last year as the major success of its Baldur’s Gate 3 title supercharged its sales.

The company, which was founded by chief executive Swen Vincke in 1996, operates studios in cities including Dublin, Ghent, Warsaw and Quebec.

Mr Vincke owns virtually all of the ordinary shares in the holding company, but a unit of Chinese tech conglomerate Tencent – which owns major stakes in Fortnite owner Epic Games and other gaming ventures – also has a large chunk of preference shares in the firm.

The Tencent division, Tencent Cloud Europe, has been an investor in Larian for a number of years.

Accounts just filed for Larian Group Holdings in Ireland show that its revenue soared to €427m last year, from €22.7m in 2022.

The bumper profit it recorded last year compared with a €214,000 loss the holding company made the year before.

Its turnover and profits fluctuate over the lifetime of its games titles and their development.

Badur’s Gate 3, based on Dungeons and Dragons, has been the most successful of the company’s titles to date, selling around 15 million copies. It gave the holding company the financial muscle to pay a €28m dividend this year.

Launched last year, the title wasn’t initially expected to achieve the level of sales that it did.

The game had been in development for years and came to the market in August last year. It won numerous industry awards.

“We’re in the luxurious position now that we can pick our own destiny and our own path, which is really cool,” Mr Vincke told video game website IGN in September.

“So I hope we can sustain that,” he said, adding that he has two main goals for the studio. “Being able to make things we like to make and making sure that it’s sustainable so we can continue doing so.”

Swen Vincke (centre with arm raised) and the Larian Studio team with the Best Game Award for Baldur's Gate 3 at the BAFTA Games Awards 2024 in London last April. Photo: Getty

The intellectual property for Baldur’s Gate is owned by a company called Wizards of the Coast, which itself is owned by games company Hasbro.

Releasing full-year results for 2023 earlier this year, Hasbro said revenue at Wizards of the Coast rose 10pc in the year, driven by increased licensed digital gaming revenue from Baldur’s Gate 3 and another title by a different studio.

Baldur’s Gate 3 contributed $90m in revenue to the Hasbro unit for the year.

But Mr Vincke said last March that Larian would be ending its partnership with Wizards of the Coast, meaning that no new Baldur’s Gate game is in development, although the studio is working on other projects.

The success of Baldur’s Gate 3 has continued, however, meaning that Larian’s financial performance this year is also likely to be strong.

Larian’s publishing director, Michael Douse, said this week that the performance of the game this year has exceeded that of 2023. It has 20pc more active daily users this year than last, he said in a post on X.

“I am also happy to announce we have achieved one more sale in the Holy See, the Vatican, itself,” he added.

the thing about terraria is that the devs love to play as much as the players. so they love the game and are always interested in making the experience better. not just for the players but them too.

they're also not a massive corporate run, shareholder-pleasing company either. so they actually listen to suggestions from fans. it's the best.

my TV incurred my wrath by having the gall to show me a banner ad while I was in the middle of a game.

so I promptly cut its balls off. (disabled the internet entirely). now it is a dumb TV. and it behaves like a TV. and not an ad machine.

I'm getting tired, man. these people are truly just the shittiest individuals ever.

i absolutely despise youtube. these fuckers are putting ads on paused videos now, and then this.

they will never get better. only worse. we need regulations badly.

they've already lost so many devs who walked away or restructured their projects for Godot or other engines.

They're far too late on this. And their pricing is still too expensive.

not the brightest bunch.

i constantly gotta swap invidious instances because youtube is being relentless in their war against invidious.

but the ui is awesome and I use it every day.

nobody:

not a single soul:

waymo cars at 4am: "ayyyy lmao" "ayyyyyy lmfao"

ooooh I love this. Proton is just winning constantly these days.

for those that have trouble with the weird paywall jank on mobile:

Twice before, this Virginia carpenter had awoken in the predawn to start his work day only to find one of his vans broken into. Tools he depends on for a living had been stolen, and there was little hope of retrieving them. Determined to shut down thieves, he said, he bought a bunch of Apple AirTags and hid the locator devices in some of his larger tools that hadn’t been pilfered. Next time, he figured, he would track them.

It worked.

On Jan. 22, after a third break-in and theft, the carpenter said, he drove around D.C.’s Maryland suburbs for hours, following an intermittent blip on his iPhone, until he arrived at a storage facility in Howard County. He called police, who got a search warrant, and what they found in the locker was far more than just one contractor’s nail guns and miter saws.

The storage unit, stuffed with purloined power tools, led detectives to similar caches in other places in the next four months — 12 locations in all, 11 of them in Howard County — and the recovery of about 15,000 saws, drills, sanders, grinders, generators, batteries, air compressors and other portable (meaning easily stealable) construction equipment worth an estimated $3 million to $5 million, authorities said.

“One of the largest theft cases not only in Howard County but in this region,” Police Chief Gregory Der told reporters recently, standing in a county warehouse where the reclaimed loot is piled neatly along walls and stacked high on shelves. “The scope of the investigation is enormous and ongoing,” the chief said, adding, “We believe the tools were stolen from retail stores, businesses, vehicles, residential properties and construction sites.”

Though none of the prolific thieves has been arrested yet, Der said, “we are investigating several suspects for their roles in this massive theft scheme and expect charges soon.”

“Yes, yes, I hope they do,” said the 43-year-old carpenter in Sterling, Va., who helped crack the case and spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect his safety. “Jail for them.” Share this articleShare

Howard police provided contact information for the carpenter, who said his home remodeling business employs 14 workers. He lost about 50 tools in the January theft and has gotten back a half-dozen of them, he said. He is hoping for more.

“They don’t know what they do to me,” he said of the thieves. “They steal our job.”

Seth Hoffman, a Howard County police spokesman, said investigators think most of the 15,000 or so tools were stolen in Northern Virginia and Pennsylvania. Howard County is just where they were stashed. He said about a quarter of the tools are in store boxes with labels that make them traceable. Some were stolen as long ago as 2014, he said. As for the thousands of loose and well-used tools now in the county warehouse, it’s hard to tell who owns them.

“Oh, man, it’s basically every kind of tool you can think of,” Hoffman said. “Basically any kind of tool you can put in a car or a pickup and drive away with. I mean, it’s some kind of inventory.”

Der said detectives have identified about 80 victims so far, “and we believe there are hundreds if not thousands more.” Police created an online form for people to fill out if they think their stolen tools might be somewhere in the piles. It asks for serial numbers, receipts, photos or any “identifying marks, initials, or numbers.” Authorities declined to discuss further details of the investigation

As of Wednesday, Hoffman said, 140 forms had been submitted since police announced the recovery last week, and officers are trying to reunite victims with their implements. “A huge undertaking,” was how Der described it.

“These thefts affect their livelihoods,” the chief said. “We’ve heard from victims who lost work because of their tools. It goes well beyond the cost of replacing the tools.” correction

A previous version of this article incorrectly referred to AirTags as GPS devices. They are a type of locator device, but they are not GPS trackers. The article has been corrected.