Baldur’s Gate 3 dev defends Microsoft for underestimating game after almost launching on Game Pass
Larian StudiosMicrosoft seems to have had low expectations for Baldur’s Gate 3 prior to its release as revealed by a leaked document, but developers Larian Studios aren’t complaining. Their publishing director responded to the reveal by defending Microsoft.
Baldur’s Gate 3 has easily become one of the biggest titles of 2023 since its official release on August 3rd. The game set a player count record on Steam, making it to the Top 10 list. It also overtook Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom as Metacritic’s highest-rated game of 2023. The player count is still over 250,000 as of September on just PC alone.
Now, a document accidentally leaked by Microsoft from May 2022 as part of the Microsoft vs FTC lawsuit dismissed Baldur’s Gate 3 as a “second-run Stadia PC RPG.” The leaks show how Microsoft thought they could get it on PC Game Pass for around $5 million. A table in that email listed Microsoft’s evaluations of upcoming games for possible inclusion in their Game Pass subscription service.
In response, Publishing Director Michael Douse wrote on X, the site formerly called Twitter, “In their defence, so did everyone else. Same with DOS2. Comes with the genre, and the way we approach things, and the way we execute things. There just isn’t any existing data that could have told anyone how BG3 was going to perform. We just had to take giant spooky leaps.”
Among the potential Game Pass additions, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer ranked Baldur’s Gate 3 near the bottom. Meanwhile, they expected to pay around $300 million to get Star Wars Jedi: Survivor on the service, assuming EA agreed to a deal at all. In the table, they marked the game as ‘Very High’ while another game, Dragon Ball: The Breakers, for example, was listed as Low. Baldur’s Gate 3 was marked as ‘Hub.’
However, Baldur’s Gate 3 ended up being one of the the biggest hits of 2023, far outperforming even Larian’s predictions. Swen Vincke, CEO of Larian Studios, was unsure how well the game would perform himself. In a tweet, he joked that he would like to speak with that Microsoft analyst.
Baldur’s Gate 3’s success has persuaded Microsoft to disregard its policies regarding feature parity between Xbox Series X and S in order to ensure that the game is released on the consoles. Despite this, there are still no official Game Pass plans as of now.
Baldur’s Gate 3 has already launched on PC and PS5, and right now, it’s preparing to launch on Mac. Meanwhile, Larian also have plans to release the game on Xbox as soon as possible.