Baldur’s Gate 3 publishing director Michael Douse has said that the ‘public company model is broken’ but doesn’t believe that ‘big budget = s***’.
The Baldur’s Gate 3 developer responded to a post on X, also known as Twitter, by Duke Nukem 3D co-creator George Broussard, discussing a recent interview by GTA co-creator Dan Houser where he claimed the games industry is continuing to focus on profit over interesting games.
“It can either go somewhere really interesting or somewhere that gets overly focused on making money,” said Houser on Channel 4’s Sunday Brunch show, when speaking about the gaming industry. Broussard responded by posting: “I mean, welcome to 2006. Once games (the 360 era) started costing $30 million to make, vs $3-5 million in the 2000ish era, then jumped to $100-250 million – it was all over for originality and risk taking.
“Publishers can’t afford to take a risk with that much money. This is why you’ve seen AAA go to bi-yearly sequels on the top 20-25 IP and why you see so few new games. Nobody can afford to take the risk anymore. But this isn’t new. It’s been the case for 20 years. It’s certainly WORSE today with the mega-costs of a tentpole AAAA game. So it will all crater as ppl refuse to keep buying sequels or adapt somehow. AAA tried service/GaaS games and largely failed and fizzled out.”
However, this view wasn’t necessarily shared by Douse, who argued that big budget=s*** is not necessarily true, but it does require everyone to be “on the same mission… which is ‘9/10 times not the case.” He added: “You can find an audience (even a necessarily large one) easier than ever now, but it’s people in the trad ‘product pipeline’ that are the problem.
“They either dont understand that or see it as a risk to their business model, or they’re unable to parse that by investors. The public company model is broken in entertainment at a time where it should be easier than ever to connect audiences to creators. Half of it is dim witted self preservation and the other half is genuine lack of vision & leadership (or institutional stupidity).”
Larian Studios’ Baldur’s Gate 3 is a rather massive example of this in action. The dense CRPG was not a cheap indie affair, it cost a lot of money to develop, but the game managed to find a sizeable audience even before it exploded in popularity.
Since launch, Larian has also worked to maintain its audience as it works on new games. While BG3 doesn’t receive updates, the studio also releases livestreams with staff, blog posts and social media posts to keep the community active. After all, finding a community is the hardest part, and maintaining it is just as important.
