Baldur's Gate 3 Dev Larian Studios Has No Interest in Being Acquired

Good rather they stay independent and games go everywhere. This whole mentality xbox started is really annoying

Glad Microsoft didn't buy them either way, they might have a lot of western RPG developers but these guys are the best in the business

"I am not interested in being aquired. I have so much left to give."
"Here is 2 billion dollars."
"I am very happy to be acquired with Microsoft. This has always been a dream of mine."

"We would rather sell our games than give them away."

I can't wait for the ps5 version, if they were to be purchased by Microsoft then they may be able to get the game on Xbox.
Larian and CD projekt are now a couple of the only rpg developers from the west, they need to stay independent so that PlayStation still has some great RPGs.
Hopefully Larian have plans for divinity 3 after this, and can't wait for the witcher remake.

I wish Sony would just so we have ONE Western RPG developer locked on our systems. Stupid MS buying the rest.

In fairness, @Rmg0731, Microsoft bought out the original Xbox in 2002.

Psygnosis, who bought out the first Lemmings game in 1991, was then acquired by Sony in 1993. That's 9 years before Microsoft even became involved in gaming.

I get that we, in here, like to paint Microsoft as the bad guys, but the truth is, facts matter, and buying up gaming companies has been a thing pretty much as long as the gaming industry has been around.

It's absolutely fair to say that Microsoft are doing it on a far larger scale, and there is merit in the argument as to whether it's a good or bad thing, but the truth is, even after the ABK acquisition goes through, Microsoft will still have fewer individual game developers than Sony, which in itself is food for thought...

Good, looks at bioware & blizzard when they're acquired by publisher, now just a husk of their former selves.

This article is partially false and misleading.

As much as I love Larian games (DOS/DOS2), they have already had 30% of their shares acquired by a company that has links to/controlled by the Chinese Communist Party: Tencent.

Tencent employ over 7,000 members of the Chinese Communist Party.

@deathaxe I've been noticing more and more publishers are releasing at the $50 and 60 price point on day 1 releases. The 70 point isn't reaching enough people. Street Fighter, Remnant 2 for examples.

A higher price over 70 simply won't fly. Now the sub prices - yes they are about to tart getting really aggressive on that.

Good for them for being in a position to stay independent, for now anyway. That stance can change in a heartbeat.

You are correct, @deathaxe. There is absolutely no doubt that Microsoft can be accused of doing it on an industrial scale. However, they cannot be blamed for starting the trend of buying companies and even after all these acquisitions, they still have far fewer developers than Sony.

Like you, it's no skin of my nose as I game on all 4 systems (PC included), but I do think it interesting that despite all these acquisitions, Microsoft will still have fewer developers. It may go some way to explaining why Xbox produces so few exclusives, and that when they do, it seems to take them an age. It may also explain why Microsoft went on their buying spree as simply growing your studios organically is a process that takes several years, and because we see weekly on these pages how PlayStation is pulling away and leaving Xbox far in the rear-view mirror, and Microsoft may well feel they do not have the requisite time...

@Fiendish-Beaver According to Wikipedia Sony currently has 22 studios and Xbox has 23, not including ABK. I know isn't exactly the most reliable of sources but it lists do look fairly accurate.

That's not what I said, @Kevw2006. Individual developers. Not Studios.

10 teams of 10 people building a road will take a lot longer than 1 team of 1000 will. That is the point. Even after this acquisition goes through, Xbox will still have fewer developers. More Studios, yes. Developers, no...

@Fiendish-Beaver The fact that Sony have invested in and grown their studios is something that should be seen as a positive and certainly not something that should be held against them. This is something that MS should be being encouraged to do instead of just going out and buying up all the publishers they can.

@Rmg0731 sony has been acquiring studios left and right years before xbox was even a thing, and now xbox is the annoying one?

I completely agree, @Kevw2006. I was not seeking to, nor did I, say otherwise. My point was simply that it goes some way to explaining why Microsoft have been buying Studios. They need to try and may up some ground or risk failing altogether...

@Savage_Joe Buying Naughty Dog, Insomniac, Bluepoint etc over a prolonged period of time is nowhere near the same scale as buying massive publisher's like Zenimax and ABK over a relatively short period of time. Acquisitions have always been a thing in gaming but no one has done anything like the scale of what MS has over the past few years.

@Kevw2006 also these are studios that essentially only worked in 2nd party capacity with PS. Insomniac did 1 game with xbox after 16 with PS and openly talked about how much they hated the experience

Was Baldurs Gate ever this popular before this Baldurs Gate 3. Not dunking on the game at all. I only ever thought of BG as some type of almost niche PC game

@Rmg0731 “Openly talked about how much they hated the experience”

It been forever since I read anything on Insomniac and Microsoft partnership. But I don’t remember ever reading anything that said that they hated the experience. You have any source to back up this claim

@Beerheadgamer82 I think it's had an increase in interest on PS due to it releasing around the same time as a certain other massive RPG. In all seriousness though it is primarily a PC game and probably seen as more of a niche game on console, although I am hearing really good things about it.

@Beerheadgamer82 Baldur’s Gate 2 is largely seen as the pinnacle of isometric RPG’s, has sold oodles of copies and influenced countless games.

But BG 3 is the first to come to consoles, so on the hype of a long awaited sequel it’s reaching a bigger market, plus 2 came out when most gaming news came from magazines and heresay, so 3 is more the louder in popularity/hype at the moment I think.

This is good news, it's always a worry now when us playstation gamers have to worry about the future of most third party games we play, as Microsoft continues to consolidate the market.

@Fiendish-Beaver if by developers you mean the amount of staff working on creating the games? If so ABK has more developers than sony on their own.

@Hyena_socks @Kevw2006 I know Series S is having some policy issues not having feature parity with Series X. It'll be interesting to see how well it charts given the more popularity it seems to be getting and how well it reviews

@deathaxe being an all console gamer I'm not really so much aware of what's popular or not on PC. Excuse my not knowing ignorance. Even with the BG3 and Starfield release dates and the Xbox feature parity policy issues, I still think it's overall a little odd BG3 is getting way more popularity on consoles all of a sudden. When I start to think of all the Diablo fans on console wanting BG3 as well it all starts making much more sense

I want to play this but feel like I will be overwhelmed as someone who has never played a DnD game before.

Let's hope they stay true to their word about "independence",if they were on Microsoft's shopping list,as can remember Ninja Theory saying similar things after Hellblsde!🙄

Given Diablo has likely seen its last PS release, & the hoarding of Western rpg publishers & devs exclusively onto XB/PC, there's definitely fewer options for playstation players!

You should be more worried of Tencent. I heard there making a cloud gaming console with Logitech. So how long will it be before they start making there high profile games exclusive to there cloud network.

@Rmg0731
I remember Sony really annoyingly stopping Tekken & Ridge Racer from coming to the Saturn.
And also really annoyingly acquiring Psygnosis.
If anyone can be labelled as "starting it" it's Sony.

@deathaxe Came as quite the shock getting my first pc built in 10yrs (& adding to it since),, the dreadful state of the GPU market!

Had little alternative in both availability & prices to get a rtx 3060 12gb card,being near $600 dolkary roos my neck of the woods...& yet this year the "value" mid range options have either been the older clearance AMD cards or the rip-off rtx 4070 , get a PC they say,its soo cheap!🤯😂

Nevermind Microsoft wanting to strongarm you into making an account just to boot up the PC!😑
So is Baldur's Gate 3 still turn based like the Divinity Original Sin series?🤔

@Stragen8 Guerilla Games.

Good on Larian Studios for staying independent. I'm sick of all of this consolidation. It's nice to see studios that have rejected being acquired like Sega saying they aren't for sale or Kojima embracing independence.

@Rmg0731

Embracer Group and Tencent are even bigger culprits than Xbox

@UltimateOtaku91

Microsoft and Sony should fear Tencent and Saudi Arabia the most because they are able to buy half the gaming industry

@cragis0001

Saudi Arabia is slowly taking over the gaming industry apart from Tencent. Saudi Arabia is the owner of SNK. It will be bad for us if Saudi Arabia and Tencent take over the gaming industry.

Glad to hear it.

@Cashews The $70 price point is only too much for people who don't understand the economics of the industry, especially its past. Games have been at steady prices for decade long stints. Nothing, except cosco hotdogs, stays the same price over the same period games have. And the extra revenue companies were making from the price raise was all but wiped out by inflation, so they're back to square one again. SF6 could've easily charged $70 and been no worse for wear. Not sure why they chose not to, perhaps they thought it would look good and they'll make it on the backend with BPs and MTs 🤷🏽‍♂️ Remnant, while a great game, has nowhere near the release history as SF. Its made by a relatively unknown dev who's previously released game in the series was also a lower tier title, also not released at "full price". Remnant's price is far more a reflection of the devs being self aware than it is any kind of slight against the idea of $70 games. The trend of devs charging more will only increase with time, as it should.

And yea those subscription prices will be getting quite a hike as well. I imagine Sony went into it with the idea of getting great, but older, games to keep the costs down while also giving these devs another opportunity to make money later in their games' lifespans. I don't see them raising their prices for at least a year or two. But Xbox with GP, they're in a different boat. They've foolishly tied 60-70% of their economic future to a service they have to make high quality (and not so high quality) games for, on their own dime, along with making deals for day one releases. They don't have as many solid streams of revenue and have to pour money into the one they're relying on the save them. They've even harmed their own storefront profits because they've groomed a large portion of their community to only use GP who rarely make a la carte purchases. They can't make much off that 30% cut when people don't buy games like they do on PS. They will have no choice but to increase the price of GP by 50-100% in the coming years. And if people thought Sony's PS+ tiers were bad, just wait until there's 5-6 different GP options to accommodate console, PC, mobile, and all the different iterations of them.

@Dark_Knight While I'm not a fan of tencent, when those companies purchase a dev they don't make it exclusive to anything.

I hope they stay indepemdent. Their aproach to customer is among the best in business and i wouldn't want to ruin it by acquisition

@Vega37 Disagree. I don't buy $70 games. That has made me stop buying those games day 1. After the initial fomo wears off, it's easier to wait. And then games like Horizon FW or Ratchet and Clank that I would have bought in the past, they were on PS plus. They lost $120 just off those 2 games from me. Maybe they make it up on the extra 10 bucks off of everyone else and I'm a rare case, I don't know. But the price hike was a wake up call for me on how much money I was spending just to play a game on release that was inferior in a lot of cases to the game you get months or a year later.

My brother moved to game fly after the hike. So there is another example. I just wonder if the hike is really helping the bottom line. How many more me's are out there?

May have no interest but if BG3 is the success I think it will be, the money is going to be hard to resist.

I'll be waiting for the ps5 version as my cpu can handle BG1 and 2 but not 3. Ill watch plenty of videos though and try to avoid major spoilers. Have fun yoi PC owners

@Vega37 christ I've read that same take so many times I could be sick. but but the prices are actually cheap when you think about it!

So it's the consumer's job to understand the economics of the game industry? Right.

I'll explain economics right now. There is a point customers are willing to pay. And they are not willing to pay over that point. It is called 'Willingness to Pay'. They do not care about economics, rates of inflation, or a history lesson on game prices.

The maximum price is 70 but that is having diminishing returns so developers are standing out themselves with lower price points. This isn't an opinion.

Personally I couldnt care less if the industry wants me or thinks I should pay 80. I have not paid 70 one time. I never will. The price is 60 and I won't budge. Creativity gets less each year, the remakes keeps coming and developers love to reskin games an entire generation. Oh, and no more printing cost on manuals or boxes or carts. Industry? Get bent.

@Dark_Knight exactly that's why I scratch my head at fellow gamers that whine about Microsoft then say its OK for Embracer, Tencent & Saudi Arabia because they keep games multi platform?

@Rmg0731 lol Xbox started?

That's great but what happens when they offer 50 million bucks?
What happens when you leave and whoever takes over decides to sell the studio?

I really hope they remain independent. Publishers are pointless in today's world and cause more negative press than positive.

I like Jedi Survivor because Respawn, not EA. I like Spiderman because Insomniac, not Sony.

@Kevw2006
That's also because SONY can't. You honestly believe that SONY, freaking SONY would not buy publishers like Activision or Bethesda if it could? And they would absolutely make all those games exclusive on PS and skip PC as well.

The only reason they are now releasing on PC is because of the success of Microsoft selling its games on PC. Why else did it take Sony so much longer to release its games on PC?

@Grimmy001 They can't afford to buy something the size of Bethesda or ABK but they could have afforded to acquire much larger developers than they have and they haven't done so far so, no I don't necessarily think they would have if they could. But in all honestly it's not something we will ever know what they would do if they had MS's scale of money.
Again you're only guessing as to why you think Sony have entered the PC market, you can't state opinion as fact as it's another thing we don't really know. But major companies borrow ideas from each other all the time and Sony, MS and Nintendo have all borrowed ideas from each other in the past and it's something that we can all benefit from as for the most part you wouldn't copy a bad idea that someone else has implemented. Apart from paid online, I'm sure we can all thank MS for Sony copying that great idea!

@Kevw2006

Even before Microsoft, Sega introduced that you had to pay to play online. Microsoft just took Sega's model and popularized it. It's Sega's fault in a way that console players have to pay to be able to play online today.

https://segaretro.org/SegaNet

@ILikeStake I'm betting few. It really blows my mind when $70 for hours upon hours of use and enjoyment is somehow too much. Video games are the best value in entertainment. Games aren't cheap to make either. They should've been $70 in the 2000s and raised from there. Keep doing what you're doing, but you should realize you're only making big AAA games less and less viable which is going to dilute the industry.

@Cashews First of all it is an opinion, unless you talked to all the devs in the industry personally, you have no clue why the price their games at certain points. You should learn the difference. Secondly that's fine don't pay full price, just don't be mad when you're called entitled. And enjoy being left behind, the prices are only going higher from here. Economics is something everyone should understand, its really not that hard. Its disappointing so many people couldn't care less and just want what they want no matter the cost like little brats. Its gross, y'all need to grow up or find a cheaper hobby you can afford without harming the people who made it possible by underpaying for their product.

@Dark_Knight The servers and the systems they run on don't run for free. We were always going to have to pay to play online eventually. Its no one's fault persay just the inevitable outcome of the situation.

@Vega37 Being called entitled? By whom? developers? I do not give a wet s*** about their titles for their customers. They are only here by invite. If they price wrong and go out of business - they can get thrown out on the street in the dead of winter, their children kicked out of the best school, the wife left penniless when needing her cancer treatments.

I'm cold and hard when it comes to this stuff and realize we are all here by invitation only - we live; we die- the sun still rises in the east and sets in the west.

cheers!

@Cashews No one is hear by invite, you really need to brush up on your definitions. You seem to not understand how to use terms properly. But if you're asking, it sounds like you're entitled. BTW how great is SF6's price now after those ridiculous prices for cosmetics were announced? Feels great to be right. Pay attention and maybe you will be once.