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.

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.

through the ages

let me just check in with Blizzard and ... oh no

To do that you need to be morally bankrupt and engage in predatory practices and exploit mental illness.

You just described 99% of all successful corporations.

If the goal is to make money and also make fun games, everybody wins. If it's just to make as much money as possible, we get how things are today.

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.

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.

Yep, this is it. If they can just maintain from here on out, without getting greedy, they will be beloved through the ages

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.

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.

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.)