You can be thinking about shareholders despite not having them if your goal is to sell to them. I take it that they mean they don’t really have any interest in catering to the demands of even potential shareholders.
I think their situation is somewhat akin to where Bethesda was c2012: they’ve just released the most talked‐about game of the year, a game that was a critical and commercial success despite not being of the general gaming zeitgeist.
Good point, Skyrim is definitely the biggest mainstream game, but also the biggest sign of their move to making Action RPGs instead of incredible lore and world building.
BG3 might be more comparable to Bethesda’s Morrowind (maybe Oblivion). Similar to Arena and Daggerfall, Larian has released some great games like Divinity Original Sin 1 & 2 which were hits, but BG3 really put them on everyone’s radar.
Overall, good company. I wish they wouldn't have released BG3 in that state though, the game was very clearly still early access. All game developers should follow their philosophy though and the industry would be a better place.
Co-op in particular was hilariously broken, even by the PS5 launch. The 20 second hitches when swapping characters was even more maddening than the constant progress-losing crashes.
No I am referring to it's second early access release. They are getting on top of it now with these huge patches, so that's good, but it's just stuff that should have existed anyway and bugs that shouldn't have existed, they could have cooked it for another year. But releasing it does allow a lot more eyes on things, plus it's getting paid for the QA instead of paying for it, but keeping it marked as early access until it's cleaned up would have been nice.
You know what? I may not have ended up enjoying BG3 at the end since they stumbled at the hurdle I was most excited to see them clear, but this is a stance deserving of respect. I’m glad that Larian is making good use of their success.
Well, it’s set in DnD; I tried to keep expectations in check for the whole thing but they did a legitimately good job with presenting you with a varied set of options for how you can approach and resolve dungeons in Act 1 and 2. So I did tentatively allow my expectations to be raised.
In any case, I was looking forwards to seeing how they’d handle their dragon encounter. The one I’d been looking forwards to all game. And BOY did they fall flat on their face. The dungeon is one of the most frustrating and unrewarding ones in the game, and the encounter with the dragon (a highly intelligent and charismatic creature within DnD where the conversation with them is half the fun) won’t even talk to you, only to a complete dickhead NPC that’s a mandatory tagalong with your party. There is NO variance in how you approach or resolve the dragon, there is no way you can influence their storyline for better or worse, and you can’t even kill Dickhead NPC. For high hopes to be met with by far the hardest failure to meet expectations… yeah, it just killed my enjoyment.
(For contrast, compare how they handled their dragon to how they handled their Hag, Devil, the entire Thorm family, the Gith Creche, and Grymforge. Look at how much your choices can influence those. Look at how much they will talk to you.)
I loved knocking out Mayrina's brothers, then going in telling her I just knocked them out, only for her to scream "THEY'RE DEAD?!" at me. Man the fucking hag questline was the most boring tedious shit in Act 1 for me.
While i can agree that this encounter needs some work (would’ve been cool if the dragon could try to persuade you to mess with the required NPC), but i don’t know if it’s significant enough of an interaction to call a true fumble. Larian also isn’t above going in and fixing things or making things better, as they’re continuously adding and improving content.
Also, from my perspective, this game is supposed to be a baldurs gate storyline, not D&D 5e, the motion picture the video game. So for me, i was really glad to see them going hard into the lore, and this one felt pretty good to me.
Not sure if they had the same issue as me, but maybe. I loved the game, but the last act had the typical crpg feeling of all the possible storylines condensing into a few. Not a major failure, but it really stuck out to me because of how well the rest of the game handled it. They did a phenomenal job of making me feel free to tackle each previous act however I wanted. The world reacted pretty well, and there were a few points I was actually surprised to see characters react specifically to some weird solution I came up with. At the end it felt like my choices mattered much less, and I was on this track of betray/kill one Big Bad or the other with the only difference being who goes first and what flavor of help comes along.
I think this is an issue all crpgs will have (it’s just too much work to have many wildly different endings), but the amount of discussion around BG3 being the new standard for the genre makes the issue stand out. At least for me.
Its because the branching story was an illusion. You think you have the choice of what to do, with all the dialogue options, but ultimately the choice is the games and the closer you get to the end of the game the more apparent it becomes as it hastily funnels you to the finale.
Building games that are actually fun is going to make you the most money, that’s it.
Absolute nonsense! The old rich fucks who probably haven’t played a game since the Atari 2600 told me that nonstop MTX and creating value for shareholders is the only way to have fun games!
People should look at mobile revenue. Its disgusting. It does not make that much money because it is fun. They use predatory practices to prey upon people’s psychology to get them to spend money. Whether thats paying just to hurry up a building or dropping 400-4000 bucks to become a god. Its an unethical market built on manipulation.
I know someone who was spending $1000 per month on Candy Crush several years ago. I was absolutely, and completely shocked when she shared that revelation with me. All of the sudden her Facebook posts about needing to quit candy crush made a lot more sense. She talked like an addict, which was very confusing to me for a little Bejeweled game, but she was in fact addicted, and addicted very hard.
It’s surprising to me because I play, what I think, is a lot of mobile games too, but I can’t even remember if I’ve ever paid any actual money into any of them besides buying a $0.99 game or two.
If I get put on hold because I don’t enough jewels, I put the game down and go to another game. Even in Clash of Clans, I got up to Town Hall 11 and never out a dime into that game.
I’ve never understood why anyone feels the need to buy anything in the games.
It’s no different from VLTs and other gambling products. Not everyone will become addicted, but they are designed to addict. You and me might drop a dollar here or there and move on, but for every ten of us, there is 1 who gets addicted and drops a paycheque a month on this stuff.
Depends, building good games that establish goodwill and a strong franchise will make you more money in the end than the quick pump and dump mobile game candy crush bullshit.
The difference is that the mobile game model can exist perpetually in a state of pump and dump because the platform of mobile is essentially purpose built to be a time waster. Consoles and PC games are intended to be an activity in themselves instead of a way to take a smoke break, the ramifications of attempting to convert the standard videogame model to the pump and dump model has been successful depending on your definition.
Sure we’ve established that whales exist in every market and some people will buy every MTX they can even if it’s CoD or whatever, but we’ve also seen people who used to spend a considerable amount of money on games stop doing so, because the market doesn’t cater to their preferences. That’s the point Larian is making, you can create a true fan base with their model, you can only create addicts with the pump and dump model.
Here’s the thing, though, people are saying “mobile games”, but what they really mean is “a small handful of market leaders in the mobile gaming space”.
I’ve worked in mobile games. Most of them do t make their development budget back, just like PC and console games. They’re a lottery ticket for publishers, which is why most of the big ones were made by independent studios that were later bought by the big players once they were proven winners.
we’ve also seen people who used to spend a considerable amount of money on games stop doing so, because the market doesn’t cater to their preferences.
I have to wonder how significant this is. Anecdotally I agree with it, but I wonder how many people are like me. I used to buy at least a few new/full-price games a year, but now I might buy 1 if the stars align (last two were BG3 and Elden Ring, prior to that I can’t even remember…maybe Deep Rock?). I have more expendable income than I’ve ever had these days and still love to play games as a pastime, but I’m buying fewer games. I 100% attribute that to the shitty practices the industry has picked up, because 9/10 that’s what turns me off from buying a game until it’s 5 bucks on Steam or free on Humble.
It’s probably not true as making your the most money. To do that you need to be morally bankrupt and engage in predatory practices and exploit mental illness.
But it will make you a lot of money and win you the love of fans through the ages. Which I prefer and will continue to spend money on.
Blizzard ceased being Blizzard roughly in the span of the dev of the 1st and 2nd expansions to Wow. That's when the core of the original Blizzard left.
And then remade Diablo 1 and 2 as Torchlight 1 and 2.
Yeah sure that’s great if you’re making a game, but what if you’re a useless parasite with lots of money, looking for cartoonish returns on your investments!
Hardly seems fair that the money goes to the people engaged in the production of material goods…
To be fair, if you grew up playing games on the 2600, you probably remember an era without MTX at all and really liked buying carts or floppies without worrying about subscriptions or DLC or microtransactions.
/old man mode=on: I remember when “microtransactions” meant sending a certified cheque away for a copy of the hint book
I honest hope, down to my core, that Larian becomes as big as Rockstar Games or Blizzard without all the ‘We need to keep growing’ BS for stockholders. Just make great games and the fandom will follow for years.
Publicly traded companies are the root of the issue. Quarterly earnings reports and the related short term profit motive are the worst. Most public stock prices are basically pure speculation, barely better than crypto.
I don’t. I don’t think you can grow to that kinda size without engaging in growth and profit chasing. We don’t need a Blizzard that behaves like Larian, we need lots of Larians.
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