‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Prepared for 100k Concurrent Players, They’ve Gotten 700K

- Their previous game Divinity: Original Sin 2 was critically acclaimed, very popular for a pretty hardcore CRPG, and had long legs.

- DnD has a lot of brand power and has been strongly in the zeitgeist for years.

- There's a big cohort of millennials who have strong nostalgia for Baldur's Gate and who have plenty of money to buy games (if not time to play them).

- The Early Access release for this game was wildly popular beyond the developer's expectations, and maintained interest for years.

I definitely underestimated the brand power of DnD and Baldur's Gate because they aren't very important to me, personally. But also there have been a load of really good CRPGs in recent years and there seemed to be a pretty low ceiling to how much interest they could get. Tyranny, Pillars of Eternity, Pathfinder: Kingmaker, and a few others were amazing and beloved CRPG games but were lucky to have a tenth of the success of BG3. But those games were generally less accessible, mostly not multiplayer, and again lacked the brand power.

I think you're trying to put too much of its success on "brand power". Social proof is a thing, but it's not powerful enough to overcome a bad game. Just look at what happened to the Call of Duty and Battlefield franchises.

I think it's doing so well because they nailed the execution. The graphics are great. The game hasn't had any opening week disasters despite getting more than 7x the expected numbers. The intro hook of the game really grabs you and keeps you wanting more (which is why everyone's still so excited about it 3 years later). Also, it's FUN to play.

That last one is probably the biggest factor. When was the last time a AAA game was truly fun to play? It wasn't too long ago that online streamers were publishing videos lamenting the lack of good games to play.

But Larian's previous game was extremely similar to this one in all respects. It's not even that flippant to say BG3 is DOS2 with the lore and rules swapped for DnD ones which isn't that much of a practical difference (I'd argue a slight downgrade). And yet BG3 is on track to be maybe 4x as successful. It's hard to argue the BG and DnD brands didn't play a big part in this.