Tweet of the Day, …Larian Studios Is Done With Baldur’s Gate? edition

Wait, what? That game is made of money!

Via @HeartbreakRidge. There has to be more to this than what they’re saying. I don’t care how pure your motivations are: when you’re in a position to put out more content for an incredibly popular and critically acclaimed videogame whose fans want more content and are ready to pay for it, well, there’s nothing actually impure about that situation, is there? And it can’t be because Hasbro wants Larian Studios gone, either. Hasbro’s take on Baldur’s Gate 3 was a cool ninety million bucks. You don’t jostle that kind of elbow, is what I’m saying – particularly when your company lost money across the board.

There is absolutely something else going on here.

10 thoughts on “Tweet of the Day, …Larian Studios Is Done With Baldur’s Gate? edition”

  2. I believe it has been sufficiently proven that Hasbro is willing (may, eager!) to slaughter the golden goose in pursuit of a free pennies.
    Or for political correctness.

    I have a two-word explanation: Sweet Baby.

    1. Or to put a finer point on it…
      Laurian can write their own ticket at this point.
      Hasbro has a history of being difficult to work with, and considers contracts as non-binding exercises for their stable of lawyers.

      Bailing is not only defensible, it’s likely the smart move.

  3. Hasbro was all “Kneel before Ursa”
    (totes can’t use Zod cuz Z-man is a white dude)
    Larian went “Hell to the No”

    I know which company I’d buy stock in, and which I wouldn’t expect to be around in 10 years.

  4. It looks like the SJWs have decided to “cancel” WotC/Hasbro for (checks notes) discontinuing publication of D&D materials in Portuguese.

    Note to all zeks: you can never be sufficiently woke.

    (I read the headline and opening graf with the impression that whatever was going to be revealed was bigger than the open license fiasco. I was a bit nonplussed when I saw the actual cause.)

  5. So… according to an interview with the guy in charge at Larian, it was more of the fact that Larian uses the enthusiasm of their dev team as a critical source of fuel, and the dev team was hating the idea of continuing to work within the 5e system. As a matter of policy, he doesn’t go in on projects that his devs hate. He came back from the Christmas break, said “Okay. I think we’re not doing this” and there was a wave of relief around the office. So that was that decision made.

    Now… you may or may not trust what this man has to say, but in my experience, that’s not the sort of thing you say unless it’s at least one of the reasons you did the thing. You can almost always find *one* thing to say that’s both true and makes you look good, and given that, why would you outright lie?

    1. I’d also say… I’m willing to (provisionally) believe it. If this guy actually cares about the long-term health of his company (and some do)… well, they’re currently flush with cash, and from what I’m seeing, there are potentially a *lot* of ways that his employees might not want to have to deal with Hasbro BS in the future that have nothing to do with wokeness. If he knows how to cultivate loyalty (and some do) then the choice between “grind down the enthusiasm, loyalty, and motivation of my team producing what’s going to turn out to be a half-assed cash grab because their hearts wont’ be in it” vs “walk away from the easy obvious money and reap a fat harvest in loyalty and morale that we can then plow into working to make the *next* game awesome (and thus lucrative)” might quite reasonably lean towards the latter.

      …*especially* if Hasbro was talking about wanting a (significantly) larger slice of the pie for BG4… and that is the sort of thing they’d do. It’s also the kind of thing that might give a guy motivation for wanting to make the next massively successful game he makes be under his own IP.

      I did read somewhere that Larian didn’t go in for DLC all that much in general as a matter of policy. I don’t know how true that is, but it *could* be true, and if it is true, it would make this move that much less surprising.

Comments are closed.