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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9682347" data-attributes="member: 18">No, actually, it was not.[URL unfurl="true"]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livelock_(video_game)[/URL]Those are, at best, mediocre reviews.They can't hire from Larian because very few people leave Larian, because it's a good place to work. It's not like Blizzard or Bungie or similar, with massive turnover/churn. Recruiting from massive fill-in companies like Keywords Studio (12k employees!!!) doesn't guarantee any more quality than recruiting normally.168 is still low for AAA development, especially of content-heavy games like RPGs. 200 is basically the realistic minimum. It's also worth noting that no amount of people being hired can fix a studio that is fundamentally badly lead and/or pursuing the wrong goals. And as you said:These errors don't occur in a vacuum. They occur because of bad leadership decisions. And the leadership is still in place.Yes. Having survive as a studio on your own tends to be pretty sink-or-swim. Either you get better and better at making games, or you die off. But that's not what's happening with WotC's studios - they're not independent, and they haven't got better and better, nor do have the same sort of pressure on them to keep it real, because they're being funded by WotC, not their own sales and deals.What's your actual basis for that claim? You can't say say "FYI" if you have no basis, which appears to be the case - it's not "i" - "information" at all if there's no factual basis!Be careful not to confuse Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance with the 2003 game Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance, which was successful. I suspect you might be making that confusion if you're saying "Dark Alliance" was successful.I can't find any evidence that supports your claim at all. Given we have no official sales figures from WotC or Tuque, that it had tiny player numbers on Steam (the only source), and all "estimator" sites show it as barely selling, it's very unlikely it made money. It's much more likely it lost millions. If you've got some WotC guy clearly outlining that it made a profit, link him by all means.But buying and staffing up a studio isn't cheap, and neither is developing games, especially in North America (though Canada is slightly cheaper than the US),Estimators suggest it sold 140-220k copies on Steam. Even if it both did and equalled that on PS5 and Xbox (unlikely - Steam is now usually the dominant seller), and got a million or two from MS for Game Pass (MS are real cheap nowadays - they offered Larian $5m to put BG3 on Game Pass at launch late in BG3's development), the best case scenario I can see, napkin math-wise is that, if the were very lucky, they just barely broke even. More likely sales were at the lower end and they lost $5+ million.Why do you think that? Just because they have 168 people? They have zero experience with CRPGs. They're subject to the corporate whims of WotC (which is genuinely more dangerous than being indie to game quality and actually being released). CRPGs are an inherently difficult market full of particularly difficult customers (but also particularly loyal ones if you do well), which generally require significantly more development time than other genres, especially at the AAA level.To me it seems like they came second-from-last in a national-level track and field event, and have been entered into the Olympics, if they're going from a mediocre isometric shooter, to an outright bad action RPG, and are now attempting a CRPG.Is it impossible they succeed? No. "Miracles" happen in game development. But the odds are stacked against them.</blockquote>

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