Baldur's Gate 3
- Thread starter Old_Hunter_77
- Start date
Eh, barring some very transparent budgets, this isn't Larian's budget level, its HASBRO's. Whatever their media releases say, I doubt that Larian, while they might have had interest in making a D&D game, came up with "Baldurs Gate 3" as the idea (and the ingame storyline basically has nothing to do with the originals, a couple of cameos aside). So the budget (and certainly the marketing) is way more AAA level (possibly higher, cause HASBRO literally makes movies and such)
Has there been any TV commercials for BG3? Billboards? banner ads on websites? I've not seen any of that, so what marketing is happening?
...you know, you probably should have explained that you'd broken your arm in this post, because that is a very loaded statement.
Look just because there is a lot of sex in the game doesn't mean........
The total corporate budget, or the corporations cash-on-hand, isn't relevant. It's the amount of money budgeted to the project. Disney's FY2022 operating expenses were $76B; GotG3 wasn't a $76B movie, it was a $250M movie because that's what Disney paid to make it. At least, that's what Disney claims they paid to make it (fuck Hollywood accounting).
In Video Game World, triple-A budgets are quarter-billion plus now, with some some breaking a half-billion. That's just the development budget, not accounting for marketing and distribution. When you do add in marketing and distribution, triple-A game budgets have been breaking a billion for a while now. I'd be very surprised in BG3's budget exceeded $200M.
Hey, you miss 100% of the shots you don't take.
It won't, though. It's drinking the kool-aid.
It's like thinking the movie industry is suddenly going to see the error of its ways and Hollywood is going to give up making derivative, dumb blockbusters. Those lazy, sluggish, unoriginal giants like Activision and EA you're all criticising... they won before BG3, and they'll win after it too, because for all the shit they get and even deserve, they know what makes money and reliably provide it to a mass audience. You can all sit there slagging off CoD and FIFA, but the 20-30 million copies they regularly shift, lazy iteration after lazy iteration, stands as the ultimate rebuke.
How do you think review copies and press releases, and oh so many pre-release speculative articles (that have to pay for writers) come about.
MArketing companies aren't explicitly dumb and locked into TV and Billboards like it was still the 90s. Throw out early access codes, half the time they're flying streamers and influencers in to places to play previews of games. Or flying the devs to demo it at expos/cons. Even the Early Access itself has an associated cost to keep putting up and updating and distributing new builds (particularly if they're careful about scrubbing possible leaks out of the EA release)
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Besides everything else, CRPGs are a major mental commitment and most people are not going to want to play them all the time and small studios have been playing the "do people like CRPGs?" game for like a decade and the answer is "Ehhhhh. Yes? Sometimes."
Review copies don't cost the company anything. Nor do I really thing there is any money put into preview articles. The press doesn't pay for copies, but those copies also dont cost the company any real money either.
I think the sentiment is more about what other games would be like if they had the same level of production into them. Like imagine the quest and story diversity a game like Starfield should have based off this. Or how cool a Call of Duty campaign that allowed for player choice to shape future missions in a campaign would be. It's not about making more CRPG's on BG3's level, it's more about raising the level of other AAA games to have more attention to detail and creative concepts.
There are game journalists that consider brawlers a major mental commitment and can't commit to shit. What's your point? (rhetorical) Critical already mentioned it. Not everyone wants games to be exactly like BG3, they just want better quality games with actual effort without being scammed or talked down by asshole publishers.
The copies mayhaps don't (although as per the part you didn't quote, separating out a build might), but someone has to actually organize and distribute all that.
As to articles, well, do you really think these websites are paying peoplle and costs just off the ads that everyone blocks? Whatever they may say openly. IF so you're putting way too much faith into journalistic integrity
You can go look at games on STEAM that don't have marketing behind them, it'll be one badly written description and like 3 screenshots or something. All these pre-release builds, Early Access, actual trailers, and whatall are very much the work of a marketing department.
Even just the trailers (of which I could find 7 seprate ones) are hosted on several publications youtubes, not just Larians, which is 100% a paid gig.
Hasbro/WotC (even back in the TSR days) have done this historically even, pump a big surge of money into a couplle of actual projects (you'll note a D&D movie was also released that wasn't b-grade) to re-assert/clean up the brand, then back to shoveling out nonsense like the half dozen "Baldurs Gate" console spinoffs that were gauntlet-clones (nowadays it will probably be mobile games)
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Notice I said should, not will.
Agreed, bad industry practices persist because consumers enable it, end of story. That said, I'm not going to allow that to prevent me from calling a spade a spade. Consumer awareness is the way through it, not apologia.
That's not going to stop certain whiny publishers and developers from trying.
I think a major issue with modern journalism is that they have increasingly turned from people who report news to people who report what the public are saying about the news. Many of them are probably not giving hot takes of their own, they're seeing what Twitter, Reddit and other social media sites are saying, and writing that up.
After all, why think up your own ideas when you can simply check the comments and likes on threads and echo it right back to the audience that wants to hear it?
I think it is even worse than this. Especially in gaming journalism because it has gone from people who clearly had a passion for the subject and just wanted to get scoops and report on what was coming next in the industry, to a bunch of people who failed to become "real" journalists for places like MSNBC, CNN, FOX, whatever, and have fallen back on reporting for gaming magazines and websites without any real interest or knowledge on the subject.
Journalistic integrity feels like it has gone to shit over the last couple of decades as a bonus on top of that, leading to more opinionated articles and even just belief driven stuff injected into the normal discourse of the news. Instead of just reporting on the news, or instead of just focusing on the subject in terms of interviews and such.
Basically it's become outrage driven media rather than an informative one.