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

(www.forbes.com)
400 points redbell | 3 comments | 06 Aug 23 15:38 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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mastax ◴[06 Aug 23 16:47 UTC] No.37023856[source]▶
I am a bit shocked by how popular this game is. All the signs were there, though.

- 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.

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handmadeta ◴[06 Aug 23 17:05 UTC] No.37024117[source]▶
I don't want to attack you personally but I think your post illustrates an common error in thinking that caused gaming to stagnate for the past decade. I can just hear the army of MBAs making spreadsheets and checklist reflecting exactly this "paint by the numbers" style of thinking. This in turn means that the next ten AAA titles starting production are going to check all these boxes and then ... will still fail. In reality there is no formular for making a hit game. You need people who care and know what they are doing and let them do what they love.
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1. hfhdjdks ◴[06 Aug 23 19:27 UTC] No.37025628[source]▶
The GP is analyzing some dimensions to figure out if the success of Baldur's Gate is surprising or not. He/she finds that, given the limited dimensions we can consider, the success is surprising.

I read your reply as saying "no, it's not possible to analyze why games fails / succeed, because they're all different". I feel that's usually unhelpful: assuming we can't explain things because they're all idiosyncratic is usually not productive. It's more productive if you, for example, point to something extra that is missing.

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2. handmadeta ◴[06 Aug 23 20:10 UTC] No.37026089[source]▶
I think OP is putting too much emphasis on brand and reputation. Blizzard had the best of both and they still manage to produce failure after failure (at least as far as critical acclaim goes). BattleBit had none is also a massive success. What makes a game fail or succeed? I don't think anyone knows. But I am fairly sure that whatever AAA mainstream is doing isn't really working. The biggest games are almost all either old franchises that usually have their roots in mods or some kind of simulator that just packages up and polishes something from the real world. So where has the innovation, the joy of video games gone? I think it's being smothered by spreashsheets and processes. If that's true then the solution is quite simple: Let people who actually like games and who can make games, make the games that people want.
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3. vvanders ◴[06 Aug 23 20:31 UTC] No.37026325[source]▶
I've not been in that industry but was for a while, the closest input metric I ever saw that correlated to success was how fast your tools let you iterate on ideas to find the core of what was "fun" and the polish it until it shined. Same applied to the art side of the pipeline, the more headache importing/iterating in-engine the more things diverged from render -> in-game.

Oh and how much publishers meddled in games and/or set constraints. At one point one of the big 3 wasn't approving games that didn't have multiplayer regardless of genre, got to spend ~5mo working on multiplayer that was totally broken until we got sign-off that we could pull it from the title.