By: Ashley Bergeron
Staff-Writer
Baldur’s Gate 3 is a turn-based RPG that Larian Studios developed. It was an Early Access title. The PC release date was August 3, and the PS5 release date was September 6. Larian Studios is planning to release Baldur’s Gate 3 on Xbox sometime in 2024.
Larian Studio was a small Belgian gaming studio. Before Baldur’s Gate 3, Larian’s biggest seller, Divinity: Original Sin II, had 90,000 players. Baldur’s Gate 3, in comparison, had at least 2.5 million copies the second day after release.
This caused some stir in the gaming community, especially the development side of it. Some were supportive, whereas others were stating that the success of Baldur’s Gate 3 would put unrealistic expectations on Indie developers.
According to Forbes, the initial success of Baldur’s Gate 3 showed that “people hate microtransactions in their AAA games”.
Due to the success of microtransactions in mobile games, a lot of video game developers started to implement more microtransactions in their PC and console games. DLC (Downloadable Content) has always been a thing that video games had before the success of mobile games, however, they were less common than they are now. It’s harder to name a game from a triple A developer released in the past year that doesn’t have microtransactions than a game that does. The success of Baldur’s Gate 3 shows that a game doesn’t require microtransactions to be successful.
However, since it has been a little over a month since the PC release date and a little over a week since the PS5 release date, it is hard to tell how much of an impact Baldur’s Gate 3 has made on the gaming industry as a whole. Only time can tell how impactful Baldur’s Gate 3 will become.
