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.
conciselyverbose
joined 2 years ago
It's not perfect.
But poaching deer skulking about with a bow in the woods is pretty fun.
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.
2.5 million people just isn't a big hit when you're spending 40 million on ads.
It's huge for an indie, but that's because they're not spending big bucks on development and advertising, and are mostly inherently targeting smaller audiences.
They somehow spent 40 million lol.
I'm not really a fan of the subscription model, and want no part in WOW (also because the single game life suck is definitely not my thing), but WOW has been doing it for a long time, and in a way that they actually do have meaningful recurring costs per user to provide.
But yeah, hosting isn't magically cheaper because you're in a country with a broken economy, or a lot more stuff would already be hosted there. And the absurd tax rate doesn't pay any of their costs, so basically doesn't matter to their pricing. Supporting a broken hyper volatile currency is just not worth doing.
Now they have to pay (with tax) around 19,936 ARS a month to keep playing a game they already own. That's a 2,967% increase.
It's always been a subscription game, and never been "something they already own". If you do subscription shit, this is what you're subject to.
Abandoning support for fucked up trash currencies is something perfectly reasonable that a lot of companies have recognized they need to do. The fact that you have an insane government that tacks a 60% fucking tax on transactions in actual money isn't their problem.
Oh yeah, I like the look. The enemies look good.
I'm just not interested in buying a game unless I like the actual mechanics. Anything else is secondary (animations count as mechanics for anything real time to me). Nice world building and characters are a good value add, but if combat isn't satisfying it can't rescue a game for me.
Nudity aside*, the combat looks like it has potential. It's hard to tell purely from trailers without hands on, but at least they show it and it looks reasonably fluid.
*I have no issue with it, but I'm not buying a game for it.
My guess is because the gunplay is limited and gets stale fast.
I really want absolutely no part of people who don't understand code using LLMs to submit things they don't understand. That's a disaster waiting to happen at best.
If you don't understand every line you're submitting completely, you should not be submitting code. It absolutely does need to be restricted to people who know what they're doing.
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.