Seems to be a Swen thing. Divinity: Original Sin 2 sold 7.5 million units yet they didn't bother revealing it until someone pushed him for numbers during an interview last year, and even then he was super vague about it.
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[Bloomberg] Baldur's Gate 3: 2.5m Sales in Pre-Release [Up: Over 10M]
Seems to be a Swen thing. Divinity: Original Sin 2 sold 7.5 million units yet they didn't bother revealing it until someone pushed him for numbers during an interview last year, and even then he was super vague about it.
To add and to give an idea of royalty rates:
In the Insomniac Games leak, there was a PowerPoint presentation with a slide that stated Marvel receives a 17% royalty on physical sales and a 25% royalty on digital sales for Spider-Man: Miles Morales. Of course the next question is what is the royalty number based on, but my guess would be publisher net revenue?
To add and to give an idea of royalty rates:
In the Insomniac Games leak, there was a PowerPoint presentation with a slide that stated Marvel receives a 17% royalty on physical sales and a 25% royalty on digital sales for Spider-Man: Miles Morales. Of course the next question is what is the royalty number based on, but my guess would be publisher net revenue?
Licence fee was tier based % of net sales and not revenue. In more detailed break down by Aquamarine.
They're a private company and probably don't feel the need to do that.
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It certainly will, half the optimization they needed to do already happened for the Xbox Series S anyway, although I'm not quite sure about how well it will sell. Something I forgot to post around here is that the physical PS5 version sold like 25k copies in Japan and then disappeared from Famitsu's charts:
Famitsu Sales: Week 52 & 53, 2023 (Dec 18 - Dec 31) (vgchartz.com)
Gamalytic shows 1.3% of the Steam players as being from Japan, which would be somewhere around 100-150k. Still, not so impressive numbers given ChunSoft likely had to spend over 200.000 USD translating the game's 2 million lines of dialogue. Anyhow, the Nintendo community tends to have kinda similar tastes to the wider Japanese gaming community and Skyrim* on NS didn't do that amazingly well either, did it?
Regardless, even if it's a WRPG, I can see it getting Fire Emblem Three Houses numbers with proper marketing that gets new players to try the game as the platforms' numbers grow, if only because all of the likeable characters with diverse romance options (aka: Astarion and Shadowheart) having the same kind of "discussion board/fanart darling" vibes as Edelgard and others. 3 to 5 extra million units would be a lot of easy money for Larian even after Nintendo's cut.
*caveat: Skyrim released on Switch over 6 years after it came out for the first time so maybe it's just the "everybody and their grandmother already played it" effect.
The game will most definitely get a release on Switch 2 but I see it doing very little for its sales trajectory.
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Baldur's Gate 3 isn't on Xbox Game Pass, right? So we know the game definitely sold at least 10 million copies, and I wouldnt be surprised if it was likely way more.
Very good numbers for Larian, on top of all the accolades the game's been getting!!
It's not on Game Pass.
There is some account sharing stuff you can do so that can increase player count (plus refunds/piracy if they connect to Larian's servers) but, the margin on that is pretty low so if it is "way over", that's definitely over 10 million copies
Yep, on top of that these are mostly full price *digital* sales with only a 10% discount last holidays and it’s still in the top 10 global sellers. Swen probably swimming in those margins right now.
Looking at Larian's history, this is more of a when than an if.
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Since the talking point was mod support, I wouldn't be surprised if that figure was only relative to PC sales, to make a broad strokes comparisson Cyberpunk 2077 sold 25M and has just 24% more Steam reviews than BG3 and BG3 is definitely more PC reliant due to the Early Access and delayed Xbox version.
Yeah 10M sounds like an absolute low-ball number to me. Should be closer to 15M by now.
I think we have some snapshots for CP2077, over half (56%) of all copies were sold on pc as of mid 2021. Then we got another figure that more than over 2/3 of phantom liberty sales were on pc.
I think BG3 might be an even higher ratio but that's already very high.
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Considering BG3 had a 1 month delayed launch to September 5th on PS5 and only released in December on Xbox, I also expect the sales breakdown between platform to skew even more in favour of PC.
Xbox even had that savedata deletion/rollback bug that was also an issue for other games, but was under the spotlight because of BG3. That Xbox firmware fix only came in mid-January.
Yes even without data I feel pretty confident saying it's going to be higher. But CP itself was just quite high to begin with. The delisting on PS4 and the spectacular screwup of the previous gen console versions both harmed the console sales while the PC version was trucking along the whole time.
Incredible numbers for Larian. I can definitely see 30m+ lifetime.
Keep in mind 2077 has high sales on GOG too (2.5m out of 25m total as of October 2023). It's one of the rare examples that Steam isn't the measure of everything when it comes to PC sales.
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Are the other slides from this presentation available? because that share split is for Phantom Liberty alone and the first slide would help in making better estimates.
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Thanks, but bummer they didn't disclose the ratios for the base game.
Using the Phantom Libery numbers (just for fun given ratios will be different aswell as reviews/copies sold compared to BG3):
25M * 0.58 = 14.5M copies sold on Steam for CP2077
14.5/ 1.24 = 11.69M copies sold on Steam for BG3
Considering the 25M is as of last October, I'd say chances of BG3 being over 10M on Steam are very high.
Oop, sorry, didn't realize it was PL. There are platform breakdowns in previous years but not breaking out GOG that I saw.
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So GDC happened and Sven Vincke sat down with Tamoor Hussain of Gamespot for a little interview about the production of BG3 as well as the future of Larian, but what's relevant for this thread is this little nugget at 1:34 of the video Sven gets asked about the scale of the success of the game and Sven answers with:
Posted this earlier in the thread but might as well just repost it here.
D:OS1 sold 2.5M copies as of GDC 2019
Then in an interview with Eurogamer in July of last year we've had this quote from Sven:
Leads us to something like this:
D:OS1 - 2.5M
D:OS2 - 7.5M
BG3 - 14.X M(?)
Of course, it is true that both D:OS1(post Feb/March GDC 2019) and D:OS2(post July 2023) would've sold more residual copies over time, and it is very likely that all the numbers for the 3 games are decently higher but I wanted to be the most conservative here.
Considering the kind of growth between titles for Larian, even just a couple more thousand copies for D:OS1 from 2019 ---> 2023 would have a real knock on effect towards D:OS2 and ultimately BG3 real sales figure.
So, in all likelihood, BG3 has likely crossed(and pretty comfortably at that) the 15M+ mark.
Edit: I do find it funny that Sven really doesn't want to give sales figures.
Boast about your success a little bit more concretely, pretty please?
Posted this earlier in the thread but might as well just repost it here.
D:OS1 sold 2.5M copies as of GDC 2019
Then in an interview with Eurogamer in July of last year we've had this quote from Sven:
Leads us to something like this:
D:OS1 - 2.5M
D:OS2 - 7.5M
BG3 - 14.X M(?)
Of course, it is true that both D:OS1(post Feb/March GDC 2019) and D:OS2(post July 2023) would've sold more residual copies over time, and it is very likely that all the numbers for the 3 games are decently higher but I wanted to be the most conservative here.
Considering the kind of growth between titles for Larian, even just a couple more thousand copies for D:OS1 from 2019 ---> 2023 would have a real knock on effect towards D:OS2 and ultimately BG3 real sales figure.
So, in all likelihood, BG3 has likely crossed(and pretty comfortably at that) the 15M+ mark.
Edit: I do find it funny that Sven really doesn't want to give sales figures.
Boast about your success a little bit more concretely, pretty please?
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15 millions without going past a 10% discount is amazing. 20 millions by the game's first anniversary seem within reach and would make it quite comparable to Elden Ring's success.
Private company, they don't even need to and I guess they can use the secrecy to drive engagement at their whim or whatever lol.
Private company, they don't even need to and I guess they can use the secrecy to drive engagement at their whim or whatever lol.
Larian's also cutting ties with the IP (D&D) presumably due to the internal mess at Hasbro/WOTC.
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www.eurogamer.net
Larian's next game won't be Baldur's Gate 4, DLC, or anything with Dungeons & Dragons
Larian boss Swen Vincke explains why the Baldur's Gate 3 developer won't be making anything else in the D&D universe next in his GDC 2024 talk.
www.eurogamer.net
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A member of the italian press once said he personally spoke with Sven and he told him if he was able to do a game set in any universe he'd pick Fallout. If Microsoft doesn't jump on this opportunity, especially while Bethesda is busy with TES6 before Fallout 5 even starts development, they are missing out on a massive deal. I think it'd be good for Larian too to swap settings, it should come as a fresh start rather than another fantasy game.Larian's also cutting ties with the IP (D&D) presumably due to the internal mess at Hasbro/WOTC.
Larian's next game won't be Baldur's Gate 4, DLC, or anything with Dungeons & Dragons
Larian boss Swen Vincke explains why the Baldur's Gate 3 developer won't be making anything else in the D&D universe next in his GDC 2024 talk.
Larian's also cutting ties with the IP (D&D) presumably due to the internal mess at Hasbro/WOTC.
Larian's next game won't be Baldur's Gate 4, DLC, or anything with Dungeons & Dragons
Larian boss Swen Vincke explains why the Baldur's Gate 3 developer won't be making anything else in the D&D universe next in his GDC 2024 talk.
That's a smart move. Now that they've become a somewhat big player in the industry they need to nurture IP they own.
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I really think they just want to make a game again that they own themselves entirely. Also Swen has been very outspoken about all the lay offs in the industry and stuff so I'm not sure Microsoft is a good fit. Pretty sure they'll just do their own thing, Divinity or something else.
I doubt Bethesda would be happy about getting all their future Fallout (or even non-Fallout) games compared to a Larian all-timer after New Vegas got a lot of people to criticize their quest design.
They might as well walk directly into the WOTC offices and pitch BG4…
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Larian's CEO Swen Vincke pushing back on speculation that their relationship with Wizards of the Coast had soured and saying that the decision to leave the Dungeons and Dragons IP was a more personal one. I wonder what exactly the studio's next project will be. and whether it'll be another Divinity game or a completely new IP. They did say that it won't be Original Sin 3 but that phrasing leaves me thinking that maybe it could be a new Divinity project, maybe? He's pretty vague about it, so there's nothing we can do but wait and see.
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Sven said the same thing in that Tamoor Gamespot interview(linked above).
They had a long term plan pre-BG3 of what was next but the success of the game sidetracked them into starting to think that maybe we should do DLCs for the game and maybe we should be doing BG4 too.
Then they went back to their original plan thinking, this isn't us, we're the type of studio that do big new things.
As for what is next, no idea, but I'll be there Day 1.
New Hasbro Q2 data just came in. Specifically, they claim that they expect to get around 30 million USD in royalties from BG3 this year, with the bulk of that having been achieved already. From last year's data we know Hasbro had already made some 90 million USD from the game.
With the game being estimated to have sold 15 million by late 2023/early 2024, I think this puts Larian on a solid path toward selling well over 20 million units by the end of this year. They really are missing a lot of money by not releasing an expansion or DLC, but I'm even more excited about their new IP at this point.
With the game being estimated to have sold 15 million by late 2023/early 2024, I think this puts Larian on a solid path toward selling well over 20 million units by the end of this year. They really are missing a lot of money by not releasing an expansion or DLC, but I'm even more excited about their new IP at this point.