MisterFeeny

Is there any knowledge as to whether Sony made this call, or Valve? If Sony, clearly a sign that they’re not gonna change their mind about the PSN requirement, but where will that leave the people in those countries that already own the game.

Could see Valve doing it preemptively as well because why would they allow Sony to sell this game on their platform in countries if they’re just gonna take the game away from the people who bought it.

Sure, they like money. Who doesn’t? But you have to admit there’s a big difference between what Larian gave us for $60 with Baldur’s Gate, and shit like $65 mounts in Diablo and $80 melee weapons in CoD and the various other chicanery ActiBlizz and other truly greedy companies have been pulling.

As such, in addition to liking money, I would argue the people at Larian genuinely care about making a good game that people enjoy. Cuz if it was ONLY about the money, they would’ve made a much different game. I imagine it helps not being a publicly traded company.

You’re attributing a lot of things to me that I never said. On the whole though, I don’t disagree with you.

The DnD episode of Community didn’t need to be removed from all streaming platforms…

Incorrect. Sony owns the Spider-Man IP movie rights, this is not the case for video games. Marvel’s Avengers would not have been able to put him in the game if that were the case.

edit: Maybe wrong on the Marvel’s Avengers game front as I forgot he was a playstation exclusive character for the game, but Sony still does not own ALL spider-man rights, but specifically movie rights.

In this case, I am almost positive Larian just isn’t providing those sales figures. Before I didn’t spend more than a minute googling how many copies sold, so 22M may definitely be too high, but I would honestly still be surprised if Starfield outsold BG3 at all, even if 11.5M of Starfield’s 12M players were purchases, and not game pass, which is a super generous estimate.

But I have more than a minute now, so let’s look at steamdb. There are 4 analytics things that provide owner estimations there. The spread on these estimations is insane, ranging from 5.5M to 27.7M. But the two middle ones estimate sales at 13.3 and 14.9M. Both are higher than the 12M players Starfield has reached through both sales and gamepass. But. These are steam specific numbers for BG3. It also launched on GOG, though I’m sure those numbers are nowhere near steams numbers. More importantly, it also launched on ps5, and who knows how many copies sold there.

Or maybe the achievement extrapolation method is the most accurate and it’s between 7 and 8 million copies sold. There is still a very good chance even those lower numbers are beating Starfield in overall sales.

Regardless, this is all some nebulous as fuck guesswork, but I feel like it’s more likely than not that BG3 straight up outsold Starfield. And even if it did not, Starfield had years of hype behind it, and Bethesda has been one of the biggest names in gaming for many years now. Larian was a niche studio making niche games (yes, the D:OS series was quite succesful, I would stay say they were niche though) so the fact that they’re even in competition with the Bethesda juggernauts these days is quite impressive for them.

Dunno if this is the case for wherever you got your sales figures from, but a lot of the places that track best-selling games only track physical releases. Or they might also track digital releases if the publisher provides them to whoever is doing that tracking, but they often don’t. BG3 does not have a physical release (yet).

And a quick google seems to back that up. According to Phil Spencer the other day, Starfield has had “over 12 million players”. I’m assuming this is a combined figure of sales and people who downloaded it through game pass. So, less than 12 million copies sold, and probably a good deal under that cuz I assume game pass would be a pretty decent chunk of those players reached. If the top result when googling is accurate, BG3 has sold 22+ million copies. Prolly enough to crack that top 20, I’d guess.

It’ll prolly be more like 25 years between 6 and 7. There is definitely some manner of exponential curve to GTA release dates.

In the 12-15 hour range if I remember correctly, but it’s been a bit.