Imagine you are a studio like Larian that has spent years and years developing ‘Baldur’s Gate 3’. Everything points to success, you are convinced of your product, you set a release date… And then Bethesda announces that their other AAA game of the season, ‘Starfield’, will be released very close to yours. What do you do? Well, obviously, you do what they did: clear the way for the bigger company to succeed as they please. And although it may seem ironic, there is none at all.
Dungeons and space
Swen Vincke, the CEO of Larian, has now explained that last summer he changed the dates so that the two RPGs wouldn’t have to compete against each other and both could be enjoyed peacefully. “I have a lot of respect for Bethesda”, he explained to Gamesindustry. No matter what happened afterwards: the strategy makes perfect sense.
“If you’re at sea and a larger ship passes by, the norm is for you to move aside so it can pass: they were the larger ship”. But that didn’t mean they lowered their weapons and surrendered immediately, far from it. They immediately changed their marketing to do something unprecedented: to differentiate themselves as much as possible from ‘Starfield’, delving into narrative, different characters and immersion.
‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ could never compete in terms of size or scale of its world, so they had to focus on the gameplay experience. Smaller, more intimate, well… different. Today, we already know how this battle ended: Larian has announced that this third installment has already sold 10 million units, while ‘Starfield’, without official data, seems to have fallen a little behind.
Because sometimes, the biggest ships also have to let motorboats pass. You never know where they can go.
