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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9728375" data-attributes="member: 18">No, it could not have been.That wouldn't have made any sense at all. I think you're reading this and seeing a sentiment you don't agree with and not looking at the distinction I'm making.When BG1 came out, companies pretty much never spent years and years working on a game, then ditched it because they had years to go. It was extremely rare. Now? It's very common, especially for corporate companies working on AAAs. Games get canned when they're 80, 90, even 99% finished.So you absolutely could not have said that when BG1 came out, it would have been a lunatic thing to say, especially as Bioware were independent.Same for BG2, plus, more importantly, the same company was working on it, so it would have been nonsensical.What opinion?WotC didn't make BG3. Larian did.I'm talking a big corporate company making games, not a hungry indie company who depend on it. WotC outsourced BG3 to Larian. Larian were a rapidly growing just-barely-AAA company who were attracting investments and BG3 was pretty make-or-break for them. They couldn't just cancel it halfway through and walk off, at least not without firing 90% of their staff and tanking the reputation and earnings of the management.This is what you seem to be confused about - there's a profound difference between an independent company who have choices over what games they make, and when they "give up" on a game, and a studio owned by a publisher, where the publisher decides when they give up on the game, and where the publisher is a large corporate company with fairly regularly changing middle and upper management, where it may be politically beneficial for you to cancel the game your predecessor commissioned, because you can then say "Well it was costing us $30m a year and we'd been at it for 3 years and were expected to be working on it for another 2 years at least, and my projections said it had a 60% chance of not making that money back, so I saved us $60m+, please give me a bonus of a few percent of that for my heroism!", which is absolutely how it works in a lot of these places.I think most people would agree.But that doesn't change anything.The issue is WotC seem to want to develop it in-house. As they're a fairly political (internally) corporate company with a long history of cancelling and ending and changing products when management changes (or even when it doesn't!), and owned by a very greedy and shortsighted company who will do LITERALLLY ANYTHING for a stock bump (Hasbro), it's vastly more likely that a BG4 will get cancelled during development. Many shareholders just don't pay very close attention and are extremely short-term-ish, and whilst "WotC cancels BG4" might cause a small stock drop for Hasbro, "Hasbro causes WotC to fire entire game studio" will usually cause a big stock bump.</blockquote>

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