In a recent tweet storm by Larian Studios devs and designers, they called out the other major game studios including Activison-Blizzard to step up their game quality in their titles.
This started with one of the EA Devs throwing shade at the Larian Devs by stating “Baldur’s Gate 3 is an anomaly, most games won’t be like this one and players shouldn’t expect it to.” And it ended with tons of backlash from gamers.
With the massive success of Baldur’s Gate 3 with over 850k players concurrently on Steam and more worldwide with their launcher, Larian Studios has every right to call out other triple A studios.
Blizzard even said Dragonflight did worse numbers and had record low subs compared to Shadowlands, so I’m not sure how Blizzard will respond.
But do you think game developers should step up their game and release better products with less micro transactions and time wasting activities?
Never going to happen. Making games is very expensive, and developers, especially those in publicly traded companies, will always attempt to maximize profits.
They said this. Sales were down, but they did not say by how much.
They did not say this. They do not report subs and haven’t since wod. They said that of those who did buy, retention was better than in shadowlands.
However, that was an early report. We have no more recent information.
It’s not up to the developers to release better products. It’s up to management to make wise decisions and allocate necessary resources to make them happen.
Where did they say that? Acti-Blizzard is quoted as saying that subscriber retention in the West is higher than at the equivalent stage of recent modern expansions (the last bit from their most recent Quarterly financial report). They only talk generally about subscriptions, their major input is on MAUs, Net bookings and revenue.
Blizzard could release a new rpg game if they wanted, or a whole new rpgrts game, or anything but they are stuck on milking what they have while underdelivering.
Basically the current hotness shaking it’s butt at everyone while they have the spot light. In a month or two something else will eclipse them and they know it.
These are the things being ignored in this discussion. My son and I talked about this over the weekend, gamers have an expectation of getting games NOW! Companies either need to tell gamers to hold their horses or stop announcing new games until they are nearing completion. Blizz/WoW has mostly maintained a 2 year expansion window; BG3 was what 6 years in development?
You can’t really compare an offline game with some multiplayer parts to an m m o anyway.
Especially one that has absolutely no inclination of doing DLC. It’s polished, and you can pick it up at your leisure. Versus something that requires subscriptions to keep going.
Well, I’m against Baldur’s Gate 3 for reasons I don’t want to discuss, but I believe it is great we finally got a game 100% cooked in the age of 45% Raw Games! Remember Gollum?
I’m proud of Larian Studios, and hope companies like Bethesda and Blizzard Activision learn from them. Stop giving us half-baked games with hundreds of bugs!