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Comment by Skunkleton | Hacker News Reader

Baldur’s Gate 3 is a truly great game. It’s interesting to discuss how that may or may not be replicated. Still, we’ve been going through years of mediocre cash grab after mediocre cash grab. So many beloved franchises have been basically ruined by monetization, and developers that either don’t care, or don’t have the freedom to care.

Knowing what gamers want isn’t hard. They want games that don’t suck. You might try to build something great, and only end up with something good. But if your only real passion is making money, then the games you make will never be “good” no matter how much money they make.

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You can also try to build something great and end up with a shitty product or just go bankrupt. AAA gamedev is not just about wanting to make a good game and caring - it's all about production pipeline and management.

Larian grown to 450 people to build it and it's just internal staff. It's hard to imagine how many more people worked on localization, voice-over, QA / LQA and as countless contractors to on whatever aspects they couldn't do in-house. It can be very well be 1000+ people.

I not trying to say it's impossible to make good games, but making one at this scale it is literally like a rocket science.

The point is not about how Larian built this particular game. The thing to examine is how they were able to put themselves in the position to make this game. It was not an accident, or luck. It was at least 15 years of toil just to be the kind of company that could do this.

This meant tireless focus on the nature of making an enjoyable game. Not addiction science, not investor pandering, not holiday release cycles... fun, story, and player agency.

Yes it took them more than two decades to get there, but unfortunately it's not enough to just make good games to achieve kind of success Larian achieved.

It's really takes a lot of work on financial and investor attraction side when you making game that likely cost more than $100,000,000. Amount of bizdev talent and work required to pull it off is not that far from "making a good game" part.

> Still, we’ve been going through years of mediocre cash grab after mediocre cash grab

See the amount of vampire surivors clones on Steam.

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