MisterFeeny

this changed

The layoffs were after Microsoft bought em.

Yeah, I thought I might be getting whooshed there, but I also thought there might be people that saw the shit they were selling for real money and just assumed it was a free to play game, cuz clearly this sort of monetization has no place in $70 games, but well…here we are.

Uh…it’s not free to play it’s $70. So ostensibly it can make its money off its upfront $70 entry fee.

They did one playtest that was 5v5 CTF. Most playtests have been 12v12.

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

The homes no longer having arrows is already driving me nuts. And I don’t know if they matter or not either, but i’m unable to let myself place them with a door facing another building or something to find out.

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

That’s a lot more work than just continuing to use the solution I already have set up for the same end result.

I often use it to watch Hulu and such on my tv, as even though the tv has its own app, I can’t put an adblocker on those, but I can use my browser through the steam link and have all the ads blocked. Just one other type of use for it!

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.