One question is in how far a single very successful game *adds* to money and time spent gaming overall, or whether it is more of a zero-sum game. While not everybody buying Baldur's Gate 3 will finish the game, some people will spend well over a hundred hours playing this. Pick a number for what you think the average play time per player will be, multiply by at least 5 million copies, if not 10 when PS5 is included, and you get hundreds of millions of hours spent playing BG3. Would these hours otherwise have been spent watching Netflix or hanging out on social media? Or are these hours that other games this year will get played less? The answer is almost certainly somewhere in the middle, but I can't say where.

A lot of gaming enthusiasts who have gotten fed up with the current triple A game model of "live service games" with battle passes or loot boxes are praising Baldur's Gate 3 for it's simple $60 buy-to-own business model. But I think it would be too optimistic to think that some of these live service games are currently experiencing sharp drops in player and revenue numbers, because everybody is playing BG3, and so all the managers in the video game business will emulate the BG3 model instead. First of all there is the very important issue of game genre: Baldur's Gate 3 as a turn-based roleplaying game is probably not competing all that much with some multiplayer shooter. I would imagine that there are some people at Bethesda very unhappy these days, because it is pretty inevitable that Starfield will be compared by everybody and on many different aspects with BG3. But I'm not convinced that this affects Destiny 2 or Fortnite very much. Maybe Diablo IV, but we could argue all day whether Diablo IV and BG3 are part of the same genre or not.

Managers at large game companies would probably point out that Larian Studios "left money on the table". That poses the interesting question in how far the business model contributed to the success of Baldur's Gate 3. Would BG3 have sold any less if Larian would be selling dice skins or stuff like that? At the very least I don't think anybody would have minded a DLC, but while Larian hasn't absolutely excluded that option, they don't seem to be much in favor. I would have loved a DLC with an alternative Act I, to make up for the fact that I played Act I too much in early access, and would totally pay $30 for that. But I can see how much work that would be, and Larian said they'd rather make Divinity Original Sin 3.

As a huge fan of turn-based roleplaying games, I am very happy that Baldur's Gate 3 showed that there is life left in that genre; especially since the disappointment of Final Fantasy 16 going full real-time. On the other hand it is totally possible that Baldur's Gate 3 actually reduces the number of other turn-based roleplaying games produced. The natural response to something so overwhelming as the success of Baldur's Gate 3 is "fight or flight", and many game developers might decide that doing something else is a better idea than competing against this. On the other hand, with BG3 *not* being a live service game, there might well be demand for another good turn-based RPG next year. I'll buy Divinity Original Sin 3, but I don't expect it to be released before 2027, so I don't think Larian is cornering the market here.

<Insert image of Bethesda manager cursing his bad luck with timing here.>