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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9513466" data-attributes="member: 18">You never have to destroy your own IP/brand.It's never mandatory.There's no gun pointed at WotC's head.They absolutely have a choice as to whether they attempt to spin up a BG4 internally or not. Particularly as doing so will take 4-8 years, even if they started already.They absolutely have a choice here.They could do as you say, and destroy the IP for a little short-term profit and a permanent loss of a viable IP and significant blowback on to WotC themselves. Gamers are real haters - you trick them into pre-ordering a bad game, they will hate you basically forever.Or... they could probably pretty easily convince someone like Owlcat to make BG4. You say there are "no studios", but Owlcat 100% would do that. They're not locked in to Pathfinder, they are absolutely happy to make RPGs based on other people's IPs, and they're irrationally well-regarded by CRPG players (despite their consistently mediocre writing, dubious gameplay and horrifically bad minigames). The hype for an Owlcat BG4 (or IWD3) would be extremely high, even without BG3 levels of production values. And they'd probably deliver a game that was at least regarded as solid, and review and sold well.Or they could just hold on to the brand for a few years until an opportunity arose (like, say, Larian's next CRPG was an absolute trashfire, which I don't think we can rule out).</blockquote>