Baldur’s Gate 3 gets exceptional praise, winning multiple awards last year and selling “way over” 10 million copies (potentially even 15 million). However, it was also a calculated risk for Larian Studios, which grew exponentially over the years to accommodate the massive project. What would it have done if the RPG wasn’t a success?
Speaking to Eurogamer, CEO and game director Swen Vincke revealed there were “multiple fallback positions.” “We built multiple fallback positions, in case it was going to go wrong – before we started doing this. I have a minority investment, so I had that in my back pocket in case it was going to go wrong.
“So this was my baseline, otherwise, I wasn’t going to take the risks that we took with Baldur’s Gate 3, because it was too much of a risk. So that’s actually also why I did it, or part of the reasons I did it. So, there’s that.”
Early access also helped since it allowed the studio to forecast where it would land based on those initial sales. “So we can forecast, more or less, and function – if we don’t f*** up too much, there’s always a risk involved, right? I’m never gonna say there’s no risk – but you can forecast more or less where you’re gonna land, based on interest, based on Early Access sales. So we could see where we are. And so we’re good for quite a number of years with where we are right now.”
Baldur’s Gate 3 sold over 2.5 million copies in early access, and while that was over three years, Vincke noted that sales were “insane” at the start. After launching on PC, followed by the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S versions, it earned an impressive $90 million for Hasbro (who owns the Dungeons and Dragons IP).
As for what’s next, Larian Studios isn’t working on Baldur’s Gate 4 and even cancelled DLC for Baldur’s Gate 3. Its next project isn’t Divinity: Original Sin 3 and won’t “dwarf” its magnum opus. Vincke has described it as “different from the things that we’ve done before,” though the “tone, style, way of doing it are, for us, certainly new.”
