Baldur's Gate 3 / Larian
Baldur’s Gate 3 has undoubtedly become one of the biggest games of the decade, but you shouldn’t wait for add-ons – it makes developers bored.
The huge success didn’t convince Larian Studios to clip DLC like many other studios do. Boss Sven Winke says that the reason is too simple — they don’t want to. Right now, the studio is not working on DLC and will not do so. According to him, creating DLC is — «boring without passion», and the Larian team is happier without such projects.
«You want a happy player and happy business, but you also need to have a happy developer» — says Winke.
He added that the studio wants to do something that will make developers much happier (and involved in the process not only because of money).
«What we’re doing now makes developers way more happy. We had a huge hit, and people said ‘DLC this’ and ‘DLC that,’ and we said we’d make DLC, but then when we had a moment to think, we asked ourselves, ‘what are we doing?'”» — says the Larian boss.
Instead, the studio chose a different path: Baldur’s Gate 3 received regular major updates with new features and fixes. For example, the last major patch added photo mode and new subclasses to the game. Such updates support the game and, as a result, the interest of players remains high.
As we can see, Baldur’s Gate 3 sold 10 million copies in 2023. It was also among the top paid games on Steam in 2024. After the financial success of Baldur’s Gate 3 the developers will move on. In the same interview, Winke also shared the studio’s plans: now they want to focus on new projects. We can expect a new game in about five years, as he said before
Winke noted that it is too difficult to work on two ambitious projects at the same time. This approach threatens to lose quality and make the team unhappy. He explained that to maintain the spirit of a multiplayer game — like Baldur’s Gate 3 —, full concentration is required.
To summarize, Larian does not want to waste time on something that does not bring them joy. Instead of add-ons, the studio plans to invest energy in the creation of new major RPGs. On the plus side, — there will be no uninteresting and crude additions, but on the minus side, there will be none at all.
Source: Tech4Gamers