Baldur's Gate 3, the RPG from Larian Studios, is not just the most successful game this year (the game had 875,343 concurrent players, according to SteamDB, which makes it one of the year’s biggest games) but is also a major contender for the upcoming Game of the Year Award, was apparently underestimated by most gaming giants, including Microsoft. The new wave of leaks has been pouring out from the FTC vs. Microsoft case and was posted publicly which revealed some key details about Baldur's Gate situation with Game Pass.
Microsoft did not expect the game to be a breakout hit and in the leaked correspondence from May 2022 the game was referred “second-run Stadia PC RPG”. For context, Baldur’s Gate 3 was once expected to launch on Google Stadia and Windows PC but Stadia shut down only after three years.
Read More: Baldur's Gate 3 Becomes Second Biggest Steam Launch Of 2023
Microsoft Underestimated Baldur's Gate 3, So Did Everyone Else, Says Larian Exec
According to the leaked data, Microsoft listed the projected cost of getting Baldur's Gate 3 on Xbox Game Pass to be around 5 million while EA's Star Wars Jedi: Survivor had a projected cost of more than $300 million and WB's Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League was at more than $250 million. The email exchange began in May 2022, when Xbox chief Phil Spencer emailed several executives about Starfield being pushed back The mail also addressed Microsoft's efforts to fill a "huge hole" in its 2022 games lineup, since the release dates for release dates for Redfall and STALKER 2 were uncertain.“This is really a disaster situation for us given all we’ve invested in content across studios at our GP [Game Pass] content fund,” Spencer wrote.
“We set a very high bar in 2021 on quality and pacing of content which was awesome to see,” he continued. “But to come off of that year with no big exclusives launching in 2022 is a portfolio planning miss that we can’t afford. If we need to delay launches (understanding there is a financial impact of that) to create more regular beats for us we need to do that. We have to all understand that the situation we are in now is a failure of our planning and production execution.” Since Baldur’s Gate 3 has no exclusivity tied to it, its exclusion from the Xbox console cost Microsoft quite a bit of money. In February, Larian Studios CEO and creative director Swen Vincke explained that the reason Baldur’s Gate 3 didn’t have a planned Xbox release at the time was because the game's split-screen co-op didn’t work on Xbox Series S.
And Microsoft requires games to have feature parity across Xbox Series X and Series S, which delayed the launch. However, this August Larian Studios bought Baldur’s Gate 3 to Xbox Series X (and Series S) but without split-screen cooperative play on Xbox Series S. Larian Studios Director of Publishing Michael Douse points out, that Microsoft was not the only company that underestimated the game. Posting on X (formerly Twitter), Douse explained how "everyone else" felt that way and also mentioned a similar thing to Divinity Original Sin 2.
"In their defence, so did everyone else. Same with DOS2. Comes with the genre, and the way we approach things, and the way we execute things. There just isn’t any existing data that could have told anyone how BG3 was going to perform. We just had to take giant spooky leaps," he wrote on X recently.
