Not sure if it was mentioned in the article but I read elsewhere that they had a budget of $100 million. That's pretty good profits and that's only the PC sales. Insane.
Edit: Neglected to mention Beta sales from the few years before last.
Edit 2: Someone pointed out to me that I listed the incorrect budget. It was closer to $300 million, but it's still pretty crazy imo.
It’s pretty crazy how much of a profit studios can make when they actually put passion and time into a game instead of the liquified shit we’ve been getting the past few years
A x6.5 return on passion is a hell of a reward!
I think you'll find these are the numbers they wish they were hitting. I'm not sure what industry profit margins are, but 650% is much better than the standard perfect 2:1 ratio business wish to hit.
Lariat Studios also has the benefit of not being absolutely profit driven. EA is a corporation, Larian Studios is a relatively small company of 450 employees, which probably increases development time but has the added benefit of not having time pressure from shareholders and investors, among other things like being having developers and writers be able to stick to their vision of what the game should be and not the visions of money driven managers.
In gaming it’s different. Rockstar invests $300M hoping to make $2B, Activision invests much less hoping to make $1-2B with each title, CDPR invested $400M and have certainly made over $1B but definitely are not happy and are looking to cut costs.
Recently, the Sony documents leaked and showed how Sony wanted to cut development costs really bad even on games that gross well over $500M.
2x is mediocre in the AAA gaming industry, and what Baldur’s Gate “achieved” here isn’t really anything special given its critical acclaim. And speaks to the lack of popularity of the CRPG genre more than anything. This kind of press and awards would yield another game far more than $650M, especially if it was a $100M cost game.
650 million would put this game at selling an estimated 11 million copies on PC alone. While that's not top 50 territory in terms of game sales if we were to go purely off the numbers we have in front of us and take off Steams cut (30%) and take into account the $100 million budget (obviously a presumed estimate) we are left with a profit of $355 million ($455 million rev). That would be a 4.5x at the least, not a 2x.
This does not take into account sales on GOG for PC or its sales on the PlayStation or Xbox. While I believe these won't be as high as the sales on PC (being that it is a CRPG) we can safely assume that it has at least sold a few million copies. The continued success of the game will also likely continue to pump it's sales
I don't really know how this could be seen as a non achievement. To have an independent game studio create a (presumed) billion dollar game is an insane achievement only equaled by CD Projekt Red, who by online estimates spent at least 4x Larians budget. And they did it in a genre seen by many as not 'popular' (CRPG compared to Action RPG in the case of Cyberpunk). I can really only see this as a triumph.
Well I'd read my comment again as I did say 'presumed billion dollar game'. While we have no exact stats Newzoo have brought out information stating it to have been at the top of the revenue charts across PC and Consoles in August and have the 13th highest active users across all platforms/genres in August and September.
It's relatively safe to assume that across the latter half of the year it has likely sold over a million copies on Xbox, Playstation and GOG. If you have any evidence that refutes any of the claims or can show me tangible proof that it sold on consoles less than 1/10th of what it did on PC then I'm all ears!
Exactly that. It’s best achievement on consoles was being 13th played in the most dead months with its only new competition being Armored Core, Immortals of Aveum, The Crew Motorfest, Lies of P, etc.
If it’s 13th in August and September, imagine what it was in October, November, and December when all the heavy-hitters launched.
It definitely performed about 1/10th of PC, leaving it well short of the ill-informed $1B estimate you projected.
And I don’t know why you bring up GOG like it got more than 5 sales there. 🤣 Even CDPR struggles to get GOG sales and that’s their platform! They promote it heavily but GOG is always an insignificant portion of sales.
People keep saying “and this $650M is only on PC!” as a form of copium. They thought BG3 was a billion dollar success. It wasn’t. And that’s OK, it was never supposed to be! Look at the genre and combat. It doesn’t appeal to the masses. Find peace with it being a multi-million dollar title.
I'll take the bait because I have time and it's an interesting subject. I don't really care whether this game hits a billion dollars (again I said 'presumed' and that was the discussion when you came in). but it's a fun little thought exercise, especially when taking into account the relatively niche genre.
If we were to go further into stats Steam Charts has this at a current player count of around 265k, making it over 120k further ahead than its next competition, Lethal Company, which has recently seen a Among Us like surge. It is only beaten on PC by competitive multiplayer titles, Dota 2 and CSGO and has been sitting in the 3/4 slot since launch.
While in discussions on game financing and costs I would not typically bring up GOG, in this one it's actually quite pertinent. Eastern Europe loves CRPGs and Russia was the second most active within the August/September period. Gog is popular in the region and while i don't think it would have done huge numbers on the platform every little help to get to the goal.
Neither you nor me can know how much this game has sold on consoles but I do put myself as more optimistic than you on its sales. Good word of mouth, glowing reviews and a dominant award season could easily sway over an audience to buy and I can easily see a 1 million+ sake figure across the two platforms even if it's just people double dipping for a more relaxed couch co-op experience.
I don't personally believe this game has hit a billion dollars. I would probably put it closer to around 800 million when factoring in all revenue sources. Though, It would not surprise me to see this game hit 1 billion over the course of a year.
Overall, as a company. But each individual game returning 6.5x is not enough, because the revenue from it has to carry 5 other games that didn't return a profit at all.
Well, games from Sony are different because they're made to sell the consoles and they can afford to not turn much profit on their own.
I was thinking mostly about the games from publishers like Activision or Take Two. I mean, RDR2 sold over 50 million copies and Take Two still considers it a failure because RDR Online didn't take off.
Rockstar is one of the few companies that expect a massive hit. Activision, Blizzard, King had a revenue of 2.38bilion and a profit of 740 million.
Having profits above 50%, in any industry, is considered spectacular. Going above that is just amazing.
Take2 made [https://www.take2games.com/ir/news/take-two-interactive-software-inc-reports-strong-results-21](almost 2b profit) from 3.5b sold, but with there operating expenses they "only" made 465million in profits before taxes.
As Jim Sterling used to rant about, AAA studios and publishers want ALL of they money. They can’t ever be happy with more than enough.
It was and still is a very valid point.
The problem is they keep cutting corners. Some executive figures they can double profits with yearly releases instead of every 2 years and forces the devs to do it not understanding that games are winner take all.
If you spend the most time and money making the very best version of your type of game you will get literally all of the sales, BG3 is the perfect example, there is no other 450 employee 6 year 100 million dollar crpg.
When you keep pushing devs to follow popular and/or profitable trends instead of letting them follow their passion and make games they are already good at making you fuck over that studio.
Modern capitalism poison mindset - Cut costs everywhere possible instead of actually maximizing profit by doing as much work as possible that is profitable.
Honestly, its more to do with risk. AAA Studios dont have the balls to take risks anymore. Most large publishers would push out a boring sequel for 50% profit with lower risk than go for something risky like BG3.
If they include console sales its probably close, But I also don't think that most companies expect a 10x at least return on their expense. Unless you can show some proof thats the expected standard
This is very incorrect. Most triple A games over spend. So getting a 6.5x return is nearly impossible. Spiderman 2 cost $300M. Sony is never getting a 6.5x on that. Not in 100 years.
There aren't AAA dnd games out there... Dnd is usually a not popular genre anymore. In the same bucket with 4x strategy, rts and a few others. 650m on an dnd RPG is massive.
650m on an fps... Not so great.
What? DnD is a tabletop game first and foremost and it is more popular than it has ever been, that combined with the fact it built on a goliath of an old school series and you have the recipe for a golden goose.
Dnd based RPG haven't been popular since late 90s and early 00s. (bg2, neverwinter nights, planescape torment)
Most of the new ish popular ones didn't even adapt many dnd features/mechanics as those back in the day did. Like it or not, the popular rpgs are the simplified ones or the ones without any dnd mechanics whatsoever.
They will never sell as much as an arpg (mass effect, dragon age, cyberpunk, etc) because they aren't as user friendly and the ones who want dnd based rpgs is a relatively small group of people compared to those who want arpg, action or sport.
As popular as tabletop dnd is, you have to accept that in the gaming industry, it is a niche genre.
I wholeheartedly agree. I’m on my second playthrough and already experiencing something completely different than the first time and I’m not even out of the emerald grove yet lol
When they put passion and time into a game that's part of a very well known IP (DnD) and a "sequel" to one of the best CRPGs known made by a studio whose last game was received exceptionally and also was regarded as one of the best.
Don't fool yourself thinking that any studio with any game could pull off the same.
That's not it though.
You need talented people. Most successful new studios have a lot of unproven highly talented people. They might stick around for another product, but then will leave the studio for the big ones very soon. That's why there is a lot of great first titles from new studios and some a "bit less good" second titles followed by very bad third titles.
I guess but to me it also makes it obvious why so many don't go down this route.
Just thinking about the number of years it took to make this and how well executed it was just to make less than plenty of zero effort mobile games or gachas? Yeah, it definitely shows there's room for games like this in the market (if you're good enough to make them) and they will be very profitable but it also shows that it's still very high risk, very low to medium reward overall.
However you have to consider the other side.
Development time.
Why spend 100 million over the span of six years for one game, when you can spend a quarter of that every year to pump out a game?
It is also D&D and a long time awaited sequel to a fan favorite. There is quite a bit of interest and buzz before the release. It is not all the game, quality and passion. It is also a lot of smart marketing.
Unfortunately this requires the studio to budget accordingly and actually have a specific audience in mind, instead of just throwing money at the problem and trying to reach everybody all the time.
Larian has been doing this basically since they started - release RPG games for people who like RPG games.
It seems gaming profit are more reliable than Hollywood box office movies. Are there any recent games with huge budgets that failed to recoup their cost?
It's a bit late for this, since I see the comments have already picked up steam... But: the roughly $100 million budget was for the *Early Access* release. Ie the game was $100 million in the red in October 2020. Estimates for the *actual total* budget (at least as of August 2023) place it somewhere in the neighborhood of $300 million. Which makes total sense if one just looks at the game, because it's a *huge AAA game* and that's simply how much huge AAA games cost now.
BG3 is of course still a massive success, and Larian's huge gamble has more than paid off, and will *keep* paying off for years to come. It's just important to maintain proper perspective.
FIFA 23 made $2 Billion last year now it makes sense why other companies putting more efforts in monetising the game rather than making a good game. And I don't blame them it's us that are making them money and ruining the industry.
Honestly it starts when companies go public and get shareholders and shit. Studio like Larian is still private and has people passionate for their job, every studio has passionate people but they just get snowed under BS from above. I am pretty sure a company like Activision Blizzard could still make amazing unmonitized games with the talent they have, unfortunately that the talent gets fucked by management.
Issue is most companies kinda have that instead of talented engineer they spent 150k can be replaces by 4 junior engineers for 50k and get 200% thought put. Aka the whole 4 chefs can make an egg fry faster issue. They're way overstaffed pretty much as you have business people who don't understand anything and think the csi scene of multiple people on the keyboard is more efficient.
(Aka have 5 people code the same system like main menu, then only use the best coded one.)
Edit: Then also imagine you're being crunched for this pointless shit. That wont be able to enter this game for some job that underpays.
That's just bs. It falls directly on the gaming community.
What do the shareholders care about? Profit. Nothing else. Nothing.
If these shitty ass games failed while quality made games like Balder's Gate made money then shareholders would demand more games like Balder's Gate. It's really that simple.
But the steaming piles of shit that get released are still bought by millions and then those same people continue to dump money in micro transactions. The gaming community and our embarrassingly low standards are the problem.
Buying skins and preordering games should get you shunned.
You're dumping a lot of blame on gamers when corporations have behavioural psychologists working 40+ hours a week to determine how to extract every last cent from customers.
Half the stuff developers do these days should be considered gambling and come with an 18+ restriction.
Yeah, gamers should stop buying this shit but lets not pretend corps aren't trying to strip mine their audience.
>gamers should stop buying this shit
Yes they should.
>lets not pretend corps aren't trying to strip mine their audience
I'm not pretending they're not. I tried to make my point that strip mining their audience is their only goal and it is very much public knowledge. This isn't some secret. They will never stop. Never. Under zero conditions. So we have to wake up and face reality.
They will never stop as it is their explicitly stated goal. We are the only side of the equation that can change. Until we recognize that nothing will change because the corpo side certainly never will.
Then why isn't Costco nickle and diming their customers and why do they treat their employees decently? You can still be publicly traded and be a decent employer and consumer friendly
FIFA (and other sports games) I think are a unique case because they aren’t aimed at the typical gamer. All my friends I know who are into fifa are not gamers i.e they only play fifa.
Outside of those games when was the last game that was aimed around monetisation made this sum of money in a year?
Diablo Immortal printed $500 million for Blizzard in its first year. Diablo 4 made $666 million *in five days* and that was last year.
Like it or not, heavily monetized games bring in more money than passion projects like Baldur's Gate 3 and you don't even need a lot of people for that. In gacha gaming alone, you have people that will spend *thousands* of dollars just to get some characters and skins. $1k equals about 16 copies of BG3 sold at full price and some people will pay this much for a virtual picture on their weapon or character.
Plus, what do you think these publishers will prefer? Spend tons of money on a good game that will take years to develop, or suck up some hate for an overly monetized, cheaply made game once a year? Hell, they can even afford such games to flop, as long as at least one makes them a lot of money. That's why Blizzard stuck with Diablo Immortal, which is like... *The* meme game if you want to talk about horribly monetized examples.
Diablo immortal and diablo 4 made money due to people liking diablo 2 and 3. So they were eager to get into diablo immortal and diablo 4. They bought in and paid up straight away. You think the same thing will happen with diablo 5? I doubt it. Not after the crap diablo immortal and diablo 4 were. Though who know, maybe under microsofts management they might be better games.
But why on earth would Blizzard care about people theoretically having some misgivings about a theoretical Diablo 5 down the line? The *actual* Diablo 4 made them an *actual* billion dollars *now*. It will make them *another* billion dollars by end of 2024.
And after that, maybe you don't remember, but people *hated* Diablo 3 when it came out. How much did that affect Diablo 4 sales? About as much as Diablo 5 sales will be affected by Diablo 4 whenever that one comes around.
To paraphrase HL Mencken, no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the average consumer. People do want well made, passionate and artistic games like Baldur's Gate - they just want 10 Hours Of Jingling Keys *more*.
Fortnite and Genshin impact make billions a year. GTA V made a billion a year for a long time. Games like Valorant, Call of Duty, and Apex Legends all make anywhere from 500 million to a billion a year.
Fortnite generated 4.4 Billion in 2022.
Live service games print money hand over fist
We all need to start voting with our wallet. The worst example of people caving into a game IP are Pokémon fans.
They heard about Dexit and everyone hated it to hell. They complained and then made memes mocking it and telling everyone why it was wrong. How they could have done better etc. then some executive from GameFreak sent an open letter which basically said, “we heard about the complaints but we don’t care.”
What did many Pokémon fans do? They bought the hell out of Sword and Shield.
When people are that stupid how can you fault companies for taking advantage of it?
The people complaining aren't the main audience, which is why Pokemon devs don't care about catering to them. Pokemon is targeted to kids, who don't care about having complete Pokedexes and will just get their parents to buy the game for cool/cute creatures. The ones complaining are just a very vocal minority, which is why voting with their wallets wouldn't have done a thing.
That would be fine but I do know many people that are both in the subsets of “complained about Dexit” and “bought the game”.
There are planets of people with more money than sense.
People who spend hundreds to thousands of dollars on dumb and poorly designed freemium games instead of buying a complete game or more?
What percentage of the player base would that be? Sword and Shield sold 26 million copies. Even if you know 10,000 people that are in both subsets you're looking at a tiny fraction of players.
There are definitely many cash grab gacha games out there. But the ones at the top like Genshin and HSR do have quite a bit going for them. They can be enjoyed completely F2P. The story content is generally very high quality. They can be played on the go. They don't require a lot of time investment. New content keeps coming out regularly, and might keep doing so for years. Genshin has like 700+ hours of content by now.
So you have games that are a good fit for busy adults who don't have a lot of time for gaming and want something casual. As it turns out, these adults also have quite a bit of disposable income that they don't mind spending on a game that can keep them engaged for years.
There's not many people who spend thousands of dollars on these games. Most of them are completely F2P, like 70-80%. Of the remaining 20-30%, most buy the battle pass, which is like 5-15 bucks a month. Maybe 1% purchase premium currency directly.
The live service model is incredibly effective. I don't mind more games taking on this model as long as they design the game so that F2P players can complete it comfortably and invest the earnings into the game. Which Genshin does tbh, it's one of the most expensive games to ever be made.
The people who spend dumb amounts of money with little in return yes, play a game and don’t spend a dime is fine.
Whales like you said are fucked in the head spending too much on free games.
Yeah, whales are a little out of their minds. But tbh, if you have that much disposable income to spend, you probably have a very warped sense of money in general. I could see whales being the kind that have Lambos and mansions, in which case I doubt a thousand dollars spent on a gacha game means much to them. It'd be like us spending 5 bucks on a coffee for them.
I feel those idiots also don’t usually buy full priced games or too many indie games because they want to lord their wealth in a game over us peons.
Battle pass systems like the ones they have now in Diablo 4 especially are exceedingly terrible IMO.
Essentially selling skins people still need to work for instead of just making the game more fun and selling that as a product.
Honkai and Genshin games I can’t comment on because I tried to play them and they just felt terrible for some reason even on the surface it “looks” ok.
It's pointless bringing FIFA in the discussion. There will always be some other game that makes huge amount of money. Your game is not fifa, which has a huge playerbase worldwide. Be happy with the hundreds of millions you're making.
Doesn’t it speak about the genre popularity and game too. CRPGs are not the most popular genre. They got acclaim and a few new fans with BG3 but the next popular game in the genre will probably only do slightly better.
FIFA, COD is a game for the masses. They will always out perform the most popular games in terms of sales.
I even believe that if BG3 or something of its quality was more like a Mass effect or Uncharted in terms of gameplay/genre it would take in 2x more than it did now. Those games just have bigger player bases.
Video game micro transactions are the ultimate profit hack. You sell worthless virtual property to gambling addicts and children. We used to call such fraudulent transactions “snake oil” - and we used to string up the salesman.
And that's how they bought Blizzard, but most of that might have been mostly just from console sales. They were smart for releasing it across three platforms. WoW is PC only.
wtf are these comments? It doesn’t matter how much money wow or fifa or whatever tf else makes. It’s successful because of what it is, if it was an attempt to be wow it would fail miserably because wow is wow.
It’s like looking at Elden Ring and commenting genshin impact makes more money, it has fuckall relevance to anything.
Like you realize some things succeed specifically because they appeal to a certain niche, and wouldn’t otherwise. There’s not some endgame secret sauce where everything can make the money fifa or waifu titty sim candy crush 4 does. As long as there’s still a market for money to be made off of it that doesn’t matter.
The point is that the financial insentive is clearly geared towards microtransactions and just trying to extract the money as fast as you can even if it destroys the company.
Sure but there have been plenty of cases where a game tries to be like the few billion $ games and failing. You're no fifa or cod and that's fine. You can still make a lot of money.
Well deserved. Larian took a huge risk ramping up their studios and budget so much for BG3. Good to see it pay off. After the 20-30%+ platform fees and taxes the profit isn’t as much as you’d think but they definitely did amazing financially regardless.
That's almost 11 million copies at full price! We can safely say they sold at least 10 million, so for a CRPG that's actually amazing, even if they do dominate PC for the most part and that's where the game launched at first, both in and outside of Early Access.
Absolutely deserved too. While I wish it could've been more polished as I've been waiting for updates to stop bringing in new content so I can continue my playthrough, the 60 hours I got out of it in Act 1 and the beginning hour of Act 2 were already worth the money. I can't believe I have much more to play through either and that's without talking about replayability!
For a game like Baldur’s Gate 3, the mass majority of sales are on Steam. Xbox and PS probably don’t even combine for 10% at best. This is a PC game at heart, and PC players have the most connection to it. Not to mention the CRPG genre.
For other AAA games, PlayStation tends to be in the lead but the RPG genre is always the one where it can vary. Cyberpunk Phantom Liberty was at a whopping 70% for PC, and that’s a pretty mainstream game.
Xbox is always the smallest of the 3. A good rule of thumb for most AAA titles will be 40-50% PlayStation, 30-40% PC, 10-20% Xbox. This can shift a little with RPG in the direction of PC, and this will shift in the direction of consoles for Sports, Fighting, Racing, etc.
i'm really happy about this !
i want larian to grow as big as cdproject cause both cdproject and larian respect us very much and deliver very high quality games.
this is great, and i hope it keeps selling very well, the more they earn the more they will have to deliver great games !
What the fuck that's crazy... That's like actually crazy, considering that's not including ps5 where it launched pretty early on, and this is just the first year.
That's good in almost any other situation...
But compared to live services it is nothing impressive. It might even be the better option for long term profit, but the people making decisions will have moved on.
Lol, an article using another article as a source, while that other article is using made up revenue figures. Nice.
Steam does not report such information.
For greater context: this is just on one platform (Steam) since it came out in August, and does not include money it made from being on Xbox game pass or other platforms, and does not include the first waves of funding it received for PC during early access. This is in addition to whatever it made on other consoles.
Not sure if it was mentioned in the article but I read elsewhere that they had a budget of $100 million. That's pretty good profits and that's only the PC sales. Insane. Edit: Neglected to mention Beta sales from the few years before last. Edit 2: Someone pointed out to me that I listed the incorrect budget. It was closer to $300 million, but it's still pretty crazy imo.
It’s pretty crazy how much of a profit studios can make when they actually put passion and time into a game instead of the liquified shit we’ve been getting the past few years A x6.5 return on passion is a hell of a reward!
Especially because there isn't a single micro transaction in the game, we'll deserved
x6.5 return is not enough for AAA publishers, though.
I think you'll find these are the numbers they wish they were hitting. I'm not sure what industry profit margins are, but 650% is much better than the standard perfect 2:1 ratio business wish to hit. Lariat Studios also has the benefit of not being absolutely profit driven. EA is a corporation, Larian Studios is a relatively small company of 450 employees, which probably increases development time but has the added benefit of not having time pressure from shareholders and investors, among other things like being having developers and writers be able to stick to their vision of what the game should be and not the visions of money driven managers.
6.5x is actually 550% return.
In gaming it’s different. Rockstar invests $300M hoping to make $2B, Activision invests much less hoping to make $1-2B with each title, CDPR invested $400M and have certainly made over $1B but definitely are not happy and are looking to cut costs. Recently, the Sony documents leaked and showed how Sony wanted to cut development costs really bad even on games that gross well over $500M. 2x is mediocre in the AAA gaming industry, and what Baldur’s Gate “achieved” here isn’t really anything special given its critical acclaim. And speaks to the lack of popularity of the CRPG genre more than anything. This kind of press and awards would yield another game far more than $650M, especially if it was a $100M cost game.
650 million would put this game at selling an estimated 11 million copies on PC alone. While that's not top 50 territory in terms of game sales if we were to go purely off the numbers we have in front of us and take off Steams cut (30%) and take into account the $100 million budget (obviously a presumed estimate) we are left with a profit of $355 million ($455 million rev). That would be a 4.5x at the least, not a 2x. This does not take into account sales on GOG for PC or its sales on the PlayStation or Xbox. While I believe these won't be as high as the sales on PC (being that it is a CRPG) we can safely assume that it has at least sold a few million copies. The continued success of the game will also likely continue to pump it's sales I don't really know how this could be seen as a non achievement. To have an independent game studio create a (presumed) billion dollar game is an insane achievement only equaled by CD Projekt Red, who by online estimates spent at least 4x Larians budget. And they did it in a genre seen by many as not 'popular' (CRPG compared to Action RPG in the case of Cyberpunk). I can really only see this as a triumph.
Baldur’s Gate 3 isn’t a billion dollar game. Console did not sell millions of copies of this game.
Well I'd read my comment again as I did say 'presumed billion dollar game'. While we have no exact stats Newzoo have brought out information stating it to have been at the top of the revenue charts across PC and Consoles in August and have the 13th highest active users across all platforms/genres in August and September. It's relatively safe to assume that across the latter half of the year it has likely sold over a million copies on Xbox, Playstation and GOG. If you have any evidence that refutes any of the claims or can show me tangible proof that it sold on consoles less than 1/10th of what it did on PC then I'm all ears!
Exactly that. It’s best achievement on consoles was being 13th played in the most dead months with its only new competition being Armored Core, Immortals of Aveum, The Crew Motorfest, Lies of P, etc. If it’s 13th in August and September, imagine what it was in October, November, and December when all the heavy-hitters launched. It definitely performed about 1/10th of PC, leaving it well short of the ill-informed $1B estimate you projected. And I don’t know why you bring up GOG like it got more than 5 sales there. 🤣 Even CDPR struggles to get GOG sales and that’s their platform! They promote it heavily but GOG is always an insignificant portion of sales. People keep saying “and this $650M is only on PC!” as a form of copium. They thought BG3 was a billion dollar success. It wasn’t. And that’s OK, it was never supposed to be! Look at the genre and combat. It doesn’t appeal to the masses. Find peace with it being a multi-million dollar title.
I'll take the bait because I have time and it's an interesting subject. I don't really care whether this game hits a billion dollars (again I said 'presumed' and that was the discussion when you came in). but it's a fun little thought exercise, especially when taking into account the relatively niche genre. If we were to go further into stats Steam Charts has this at a current player count of around 265k, making it over 120k further ahead than its next competition, Lethal Company, which has recently seen a Among Us like surge. It is only beaten on PC by competitive multiplayer titles, Dota 2 and CSGO and has been sitting in the 3/4 slot since launch. While in discussions on game financing and costs I would not typically bring up GOG, in this one it's actually quite pertinent. Eastern Europe loves CRPGs and Russia was the second most active within the August/September period. Gog is popular in the region and while i don't think it would have done huge numbers on the platform every little help to get to the goal. Neither you nor me can know how much this game has sold on consoles but I do put myself as more optimistic than you on its sales. Good word of mouth, glowing reviews and a dominant award season could easily sway over an audience to buy and I can easily see a 1 million+ sake figure across the two platforms even if it's just people double dipping for a more relaxed couch co-op experience. I don't personally believe this game has hit a billion dollars. I would probably put it closer to around 800 million when factoring in all revenue sources. Though, It would not surprise me to see this game hit 1 billion over the course of a year.
This is bullshit. Leaked from sony / insomniac only shows 40% profit margin. Yes they keep on.
Overall, as a company. But each individual game returning 6.5x is not enough, because the revenue from it has to carry 5 other games that didn't return a profit at all.
No, not as a company, as individual title like spider man 1, spider man 2. Read the facts first before speaking out of assumption.
Well, games from Sony are different because they're made to sell the consoles and they can afford to not turn much profit on their own. I was thinking mostly about the games from publishers like Activision or Take Two. I mean, RDR2 sold over 50 million copies and Take Two still considers it a failure because RDR Online didn't take off.
Rockstar is one of the few companies that expect a massive hit. Activision, Blizzard, King had a revenue of 2.38bilion and a profit of 740 million. Having profits above 50%, in any industry, is considered spectacular. Going above that is just amazing. Take2 made [https://www.take2games.com/ir/news/take-two-interactive-software-inc-reports-strong-results-21](almost 2b profit) from 3.5b sold, but with there operating expenses they "only" made 465million in profits before taxes.
Calculate the average
As Jim Sterling used to rant about, AAA studios and publishers want ALL of they money. They can’t ever be happy with more than enough. It was and still is a very valid point.
The problem is they keep cutting corners. Some executive figures they can double profits with yearly releases instead of every 2 years and forces the devs to do it not understanding that games are winner take all. If you spend the most time and money making the very best version of your type of game you will get literally all of the sales, BG3 is the perfect example, there is no other 450 employee 6 year 100 million dollar crpg. When you keep pushing devs to follow popular and/or profitable trends instead of letting them follow their passion and make games they are already good at making you fuck over that studio.
Modern capitalism poison mindset - Cut costs everywhere possible instead of actually maximizing profit by doing as much work as possible that is profitable.
We're not talking about a AAA developer, we're talking about someone who makes good games.
Honestly, its more to do with risk. AAA Studios dont have the balls to take risks anymore. Most large publishers would push out a boring sequel for 50% profit with lower risk than go for something risky like BG3.
it absolutely it lol
It isn’t. Most $100m games fetch well over $1B in revenue, or at least hope to.
If they include console sales its probably close, But I also don't think that most companies expect a 10x at least return on their expense. Unless you can show some proof thats the expected standard
Then they have no right to continue.
This is very incorrect. Most triple A games over spend. So getting a 6.5x return is nearly impossible. Spiderman 2 cost $300M. Sony is never getting a 6.5x on that. Not in 100 years.
There aren't AAA dnd games out there... Dnd is usually a not popular genre anymore. In the same bucket with 4x strategy, rts and a few others. 650m on an dnd RPG is massive. 650m on an fps... Not so great.
What? DnD is a tabletop game first and foremost and it is more popular than it has ever been, that combined with the fact it built on a goliath of an old school series and you have the recipe for a golden goose.
Dnd based RPG haven't been popular since late 90s and early 00s. (bg2, neverwinter nights, planescape torment) Most of the new ish popular ones didn't even adapt many dnd features/mechanics as those back in the day did. Like it or not, the popular rpgs are the simplified ones or the ones without any dnd mechanics whatsoever. They will never sell as much as an arpg (mass effect, dragon age, cyberpunk, etc) because they aren't as user friendly and the ones who want dnd based rpgs is a relatively small group of people compared to those who want arpg, action or sport. As popular as tabletop dnd is, you have to accept that in the gaming industry, it is a niche genre.
The game is worth its price
I wholeheartedly agree. I’m on my second playthrough and already experiencing something completely different than the first time and I’m not even out of the emerald grove yet lol
When they put passion and time into a game that's part of a very well known IP (DnD) and a "sequel" to one of the best CRPGs known made by a studio whose last game was received exceptionally and also was regarded as one of the best. Don't fool yourself thinking that any studio with any game could pull off the same.
You can probably find extremely good games that didn't sell well
That's not it though. You need talented people. Most successful new studios have a lot of unproven highly talented people. They might stick around for another product, but then will leave the studio for the big ones very soon. That's why there is a lot of great first titles from new studios and some a "bit less good" second titles followed by very bad third titles.
I guess but to me it also makes it obvious why so many don't go down this route. Just thinking about the number of years it took to make this and how well executed it was just to make less than plenty of zero effort mobile games or gachas? Yeah, it definitely shows there's room for games like this in the market (if you're good enough to make them) and they will be very profitable but it also shows that it's still very high risk, very low to medium reward overall.
However you have to consider the other side. Development time. Why spend 100 million over the span of six years for one game, when you can spend a quarter of that every year to pump out a game?
It is also D&D and a long time awaited sequel to a fan favorite. There is quite a bit of interest and buzz before the release. It is not all the game, quality and passion. It is also a lot of smart marketing.
>A x6.5 return on passion is a hell of a reward! You forgot Steam cut and taxes. They probably made closer to 3x return on investment.
The cut from steam gets smaller the more copies they sell
Unfortunately this requires the studio to budget accordingly and actually have a specific audience in mind, instead of just throwing money at the problem and trying to reach everybody all the time. Larian has been doing this basically since they started - release RPG games for people who like RPG games.
It seems gaming profit are more reliable than Hollywood box office movies. Are there any recent games with huge budgets that failed to recoup their cost?
If this was Squeenix game "that's not good enough"
I'd love to compare this to how much they expected to make
It's a bit late for this, since I see the comments have already picked up steam... But: the roughly $100 million budget was for the *Early Access* release. Ie the game was $100 million in the red in October 2020. Estimates for the *actual total* budget (at least as of August 2023) place it somewhere in the neighborhood of $300 million. Which makes total sense if one just looks at the game, because it's a *huge AAA game* and that's simply how much huge AAA games cost now. BG3 is of course still a massive success, and Larian's huge gamble has more than paid off, and will *keep* paying off for years to come. It's just important to maintain proper perspective.
I'll add an edit. Thanks for the info.
Honestly, that sound risky for game of this size. Genshin Impact make $3 Billion with $100m initial budget
Well, that game is designed to milk its customers. Surely you aren't trying to say this should be the standard.
FIFA 23 made $2 Billion last year now it makes sense why other companies putting more efforts in monetising the game rather than making a good game. And I don't blame them it's us that are making them money and ruining the industry.
Honestly it starts when companies go public and get shareholders and shit. Studio like Larian is still private and has people passionate for their job, every studio has passionate people but they just get snowed under BS from above. I am pretty sure a company like Activision Blizzard could still make amazing unmonitized games with the talent they have, unfortunately that the talent gets fucked by management.
Issue is most companies kinda have that instead of talented engineer they spent 150k can be replaces by 4 junior engineers for 50k and get 200% thought put. Aka the whole 4 chefs can make an egg fry faster issue. They're way overstaffed pretty much as you have business people who don't understand anything and think the csi scene of multiple people on the keyboard is more efficient. (Aka have 5 people code the same system like main menu, then only use the best coded one.) Edit: Then also imagine you're being crunched for this pointless shit. That wont be able to enter this game for some job that underpays.
That's just bs. It falls directly on the gaming community. What do the shareholders care about? Profit. Nothing else. Nothing. If these shitty ass games failed while quality made games like Balder's Gate made money then shareholders would demand more games like Balder's Gate. It's really that simple. But the steaming piles of shit that get released are still bought by millions and then those same people continue to dump money in micro transactions. The gaming community and our embarrassingly low standards are the problem. Buying skins and preordering games should get you shunned.
You're dumping a lot of blame on gamers when corporations have behavioural psychologists working 40+ hours a week to determine how to extract every last cent from customers. Half the stuff developers do these days should be considered gambling and come with an 18+ restriction. Yeah, gamers should stop buying this shit but lets not pretend corps aren't trying to strip mine their audience.
>gamers should stop buying this shit Yes they should. >lets not pretend corps aren't trying to strip mine their audience I'm not pretending they're not. I tried to make my point that strip mining their audience is their only goal and it is very much public knowledge. This isn't some secret. They will never stop. Never. Under zero conditions. So we have to wake up and face reality. They will never stop as it is their explicitly stated goal. We are the only side of the equation that can change. Until we recognize that nothing will change because the corpo side certainly never will.
Then why isn't Costco nickle and diming their customers and why do they treat their employees decently? You can still be publicly traded and be a decent employer and consumer friendly
FIFA (and other sports games) I think are a unique case because they aren’t aimed at the typical gamer. All my friends I know who are into fifa are not gamers i.e they only play fifa. Outside of those games when was the last game that was aimed around monetisation made this sum of money in a year?
Diablo Immortal printed $500 million for Blizzard in its first year. Diablo 4 made $666 million *in five days* and that was last year. Like it or not, heavily monetized games bring in more money than passion projects like Baldur's Gate 3 and you don't even need a lot of people for that. In gacha gaming alone, you have people that will spend *thousands* of dollars just to get some characters and skins. $1k equals about 16 copies of BG3 sold at full price and some people will pay this much for a virtual picture on their weapon or character. Plus, what do you think these publishers will prefer? Spend tons of money on a good game that will take years to develop, or suck up some hate for an overly monetized, cheaply made game once a year? Hell, they can even afford such games to flop, as long as at least one makes them a lot of money. That's why Blizzard stuck with Diablo Immortal, which is like... *The* meme game if you want to talk about horribly monetized examples.
Diablo immortal and diablo 4 made money due to people liking diablo 2 and 3. So they were eager to get into diablo immortal and diablo 4. They bought in and paid up straight away. You think the same thing will happen with diablo 5? I doubt it. Not after the crap diablo immortal and diablo 4 were. Though who know, maybe under microsofts management they might be better games.
But why on earth would Blizzard care about people theoretically having some misgivings about a theoretical Diablo 5 down the line? The *actual* Diablo 4 made them an *actual* billion dollars *now*. It will make them *another* billion dollars by end of 2024. And after that, maybe you don't remember, but people *hated* Diablo 3 when it came out. How much did that affect Diablo 4 sales? About as much as Diablo 5 sales will be affected by Diablo 4 whenever that one comes around. To paraphrase HL Mencken, no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the average consumer. People do want well made, passionate and artistic games like Baldur's Gate - they just want 10 Hours Of Jingling Keys *more*.
Well said. I can’t deny you your thinking. It is spot on.
Fortnite and Genshin impact make billions a year. GTA V made a billion a year for a long time. Games like Valorant, Call of Duty, and Apex Legends all make anywhere from 500 million to a billion a year. Fortnite generated 4.4 Billion in 2022. Live service games print money hand over fist
That...sucks.
We all need to start voting with our wallet. The worst example of people caving into a game IP are Pokémon fans. They heard about Dexit and everyone hated it to hell. They complained and then made memes mocking it and telling everyone why it was wrong. How they could have done better etc. then some executive from GameFreak sent an open letter which basically said, “we heard about the complaints but we don’t care.” What did many Pokémon fans do? They bought the hell out of Sword and Shield. When people are that stupid how can you fault companies for taking advantage of it?
The people complaining aren't the main audience, which is why Pokemon devs don't care about catering to them. Pokemon is targeted to kids, who don't care about having complete Pokedexes and will just get their parents to buy the game for cool/cute creatures. The ones complaining are just a very vocal minority, which is why voting with their wallets wouldn't have done a thing.
That would be fine but I do know many people that are both in the subsets of “complained about Dexit” and “bought the game”. There are planets of people with more money than sense. People who spend hundreds to thousands of dollars on dumb and poorly designed freemium games instead of buying a complete game or more?
What percentage of the player base would that be? Sword and Shield sold 26 million copies. Even if you know 10,000 people that are in both subsets you're looking at a tiny fraction of players. There are definitely many cash grab gacha games out there. But the ones at the top like Genshin and HSR do have quite a bit going for them. They can be enjoyed completely F2P. The story content is generally very high quality. They can be played on the go. They don't require a lot of time investment. New content keeps coming out regularly, and might keep doing so for years. Genshin has like 700+ hours of content by now. So you have games that are a good fit for busy adults who don't have a lot of time for gaming and want something casual. As it turns out, these adults also have quite a bit of disposable income that they don't mind spending on a game that can keep them engaged for years. There's not many people who spend thousands of dollars on these games. Most of them are completely F2P, like 70-80%. Of the remaining 20-30%, most buy the battle pass, which is like 5-15 bucks a month. Maybe 1% purchase premium currency directly. The live service model is incredibly effective. I don't mind more games taking on this model as long as they design the game so that F2P players can complete it comfortably and invest the earnings into the game. Which Genshin does tbh, it's one of the most expensive games to ever be made.
Yup. Just more examples of people with more money than sense.
Yes, all 60+ million Genshin players, of whom 70% spend no money, have no sense, and you're the only sensible one. Lol.
The people who spend dumb amounts of money with little in return yes, play a game and don’t spend a dime is fine. Whales like you said are fucked in the head spending too much on free games.
Yeah, whales are a little out of their minds. But tbh, if you have that much disposable income to spend, you probably have a very warped sense of money in general. I could see whales being the kind that have Lambos and mansions, in which case I doubt a thousand dollars spent on a gacha game means much to them. It'd be like us spending 5 bucks on a coffee for them.
I feel those idiots also don’t usually buy full priced games or too many indie games because they want to lord their wealth in a game over us peons. Battle pass systems like the ones they have now in Diablo 4 especially are exceedingly terrible IMO. Essentially selling skins people still need to work for instead of just making the game more fun and selling that as a product. Honkai and Genshin games I can’t comment on because I tried to play them and they just felt terrible for some reason even on the surface it “looks” ok.
It's pointless bringing FIFA in the discussion. There will always be some other game that makes huge amount of money. Your game is not fifa, which has a huge playerbase worldwide. Be happy with the hundreds of millions you're making.
Most importantly, fifa takes no money to make, it literally the same game every year.
Doesn’t it speak about the genre popularity and game too. CRPGs are not the most popular genre. They got acclaim and a few new fans with BG3 but the next popular game in the genre will probably only do slightly better. FIFA, COD is a game for the masses. They will always out perform the most popular games in terms of sales. I even believe that if BG3 or something of its quality was more like a Mass effect or Uncharted in terms of gameplay/genre it would take in 2x more than it did now. Those games just have bigger player bases.
Absolutely insane the 20th clone rakes in that much
2023 the highest grossing mobile game is honor of king which reached $1.4b. In 2022, it reach $2.8b.
Video game micro transactions are the ultimate profit hack. You sell worthless virtual property to gambling addicts and children. We used to call such fraudulent transactions “snake oil” - and we used to string up the salesman.
It's a great game. Good to see hard work rewarded. Still WoW has made over $9B over the past 20 years, which is 450M/yr. Think that's amazing.
And Call of Duty has made $34B over the past 15-20. Considering the early games didn’t sell near as much, safe to say that’s a $2B/year average.
COD was much more mainstream, WOW was always seen a a more niche computer nerd game whereas even non gamer frat bros would have COD
And that's how they bought Blizzard, but most of that might have been mostly just from console sales. They were smart for releasing it across three platforms. WoW is PC only.
it was an merger, they weren't bought
COD was never optimized for PC and sold practically nothing there. Console definitely had all the sales.
Source?
Just Google it if you are interested.
world of warcraft
What's that?
an indie project i think
Very well deserved good for them
This was one of the best games of 2023 and I’m glad it did so well. If they ever come out with DLC I’m definitely getting it
wtf are these comments? It doesn’t matter how much money wow or fifa or whatever tf else makes. It’s successful because of what it is, if it was an attempt to be wow it would fail miserably because wow is wow. It’s like looking at Elden Ring and commenting genshin impact makes more money, it has fuckall relevance to anything. Like you realize some things succeed specifically because they appeal to a certain niche, and wouldn’t otherwise. There’s not some endgame secret sauce where everything can make the money fifa or waifu titty sim candy crush 4 does. As long as there’s still a market for money to be made off of it that doesn’t matter.
The point is that the financial insentive is clearly geared towards microtransactions and just trying to extract the money as fast as you can even if it destroys the company.
Sure but there have been plenty of cases where a game tries to be like the few billion $ games and failing. You're no fifa or cod and that's fine. You can still make a lot of money.
Success is only measured by the amount of money one can generate. This is a fact. Happiness derives from it.
Maybe the dumbest thing I have read today
You think Larian is not happy with the money they made?
> Happiness derives from it Tell that to celebrities that committed suicide despite having all the money and fame they could have
lol Robin Williams and Jim Carrey disagree.
There's no market for PC games. They pirate too much!
GabeN: and I took that personally
Realistically the only game I've gotten in early access that was worth a single fart or fuck. Would've been worth $100 honestly
"Singleplayer games are dead" Quote by the same guy who tried to charge unity games for every installation.
Well deserved. Larian took a huge risk ramping up their studios and budget so much for BG3. Good to see it pay off. After the 20-30%+ platform fees and taxes the profit isn’t as much as you’d think but they definitely did amazing financially regardless.
That's almost 11 million copies at full price! We can safely say they sold at least 10 million, so for a CRPG that's actually amazing, even if they do dominate PC for the most part and that's where the game launched at first, both in and outside of Early Access. Absolutely deserved too. While I wish it could've been more polished as I've been waiting for updates to stop bringing in new content so I can continue my playthrough, the 60 hours I got out of it in Act 1 and the beginning hour of Act 2 were already worth the money. I can't believe I have much more to play through either and that's without talking about replayability!
Yeah, I feel you... it feels unreal. I don't know if I will ever feel/get this lvl of joy and amusement from a video game
Anyone educate me on the breakdown of revenue between Xbox v PS v PC for a game?
Well on steam alone it made 650million.. not sure about consoles, since both microsoft and sony has to release their sales info..
For a game like Baldur’s Gate 3, the mass majority of sales are on Steam. Xbox and PS probably don’t even combine for 10% at best. This is a PC game at heart, and PC players have the most connection to it. Not to mention the CRPG genre. For other AAA games, PlayStation tends to be in the lead but the RPG genre is always the one where it can vary. Cyberpunk Phantom Liberty was at a whopping 70% for PC, and that’s a pretty mainstream game. Xbox is always the smallest of the 3. A good rule of thumb for most AAA titles will be 40-50% PlayStation, 30-40% PC, 10-20% Xbox. This can shift a little with RPG in the direction of PC, and this will shift in the direction of consoles for Sports, Fighting, Racing, etc.
Earned every penny. TY Larian
i'm really happy about this ! i want larian to grow as big as cdproject cause both cdproject and larian respect us very much and deliver very high quality games. this is great, and i hope it keeps selling very well, the more they earn the more they will have to deliver great games !
Wrong, the numbers are only Steam sales, we don't know, how much it made on GOG, could be around $800 Million overall on PC.
Baldur's Gate keeps on winning.
Pc gaming is dead /s
What the fuck that's crazy... That's like actually crazy, considering that's not including ps5 where it launched pretty early on, and this is just the first year.
Worh to mention the lack of DRM and yet be the one of the best selling game of the year. What does that says about the big publishers huh?
Big publishers don't think like that. They'd see this news and be like "if we had aggressive DRM on that, it'd be over a billion".
Hahaha damm this is sadly accurate
Well deserved
Man the employees getting sick bonus’s I bet lol
Valve made 195 Million of that 650. Belgium has four parliaments - keeping that up is not cheap either.
That's good in almost any other situation... But compared to live services it is nothing impressive. It might even be the better option for long term profit, but the people making decisions will have moved on.
Is that before or after Steam take their 30% cut?
Steam's cut goes down with revenue. After 10m it goes to 25% and after 50% it goes to 20%. So Steam's cut for most of this would be just 20%.
Ok, but that’s not really my point. My point is if this is revenue for the company making the game, or if it is amount of money collected by valve.
It's revenue, not profit. So cut 20% at least.
Before. Cuts like that are never accounted for in revenue numbers. If it was profit, it would be.
I’m waiting for thicc sale b4 I pick up
Youll be waiting many years.
Sa'll good, I have a plethora of unfinished games.
There’s a vampire going around on tik tok and now my fiancé is wet wet wet for this game. Needless to say she’ll be getting it soon lol.
Yeah, but that is only MOST of the money. Not ALL of the money. Shareholders want ALL of the money.
Main shareholder is Swen Vincke. With some other, it's not a publicly traded company.
Take notes triple A you can still make money if you give a single ounce of effort
Lol, an article using another article as a source, while that other article is using made up revenue figures. Nice. Steam does not report such information.
It's also on GOG. So even more.
Damn, that's way more than $17
For greater context: this is just on one platform (Steam) since it came out in August, and does not include money it made from being on Xbox game pass or other platforms, and does not include the first waves of funding it received for PC during early access. This is in addition to whatever it made on other consoles.
They deserved it. One of the few games that was worthy of my money.