D&D General - No, Hasbro Is Not Selling D&D | Page 6

Last estimate I heard for BG3 sales was 6 million copies. At $60 or $70 per copy, that would be ... far less than 1bn in US Dollars. I hear lifetime total sales for OS 2 was about the same. Lifetime they may have $1Bn overall all their titles.

Does anyone have data contradicting that?

Those figures are obviously not correct. Where did you get them? I can't find anything like that Googling.

We don't know the exact figures but we know enough to dismiss 6m entirely.

The Belgian embassy (!!!) said it sold 5m copies at PC launch last year (presumably including the Early Access ones). So you'd be claiming that they've only sold 1m copies in the seven months since, despite having since released on PS5 and Xbox? BG3 sat at between second and fourth on Steam bestsellers for that entire period, only dropping down the list when Palworld and some others arrived this month. Note that DOS2, which you seem to think had the same sales, was only briefly in the Steam top 10 (comparatively), so that seems like a very poor comparison. And the market is a lot larger now for CRPGs than it was when DOS2 came out (and for videogames in general!).

They seem to have sold 9.8m copies on Steam as of mid-September though, though I'm trying to find the exact source for this.

As of October, VG Insights estimated "over 10m" on Steam and they now estimate 13.4m, and SteamSpy estimated 21-22m on Steam as of December (but SteamSpy is often pretty high). Other analysts generally put them between 10-12m late last year on Steam alone.

Until Larian release figures, if they ever do, we won't know, but frankly there's no realistic possibility it sold less than 10m copies and likely quite a lot more than that. Furthermore, it's likely to keep selling. DOS2, which you were using as a comparison, sold 700k copies at launch (considered high at the time), but kept selling for a very long time, so reached $6m to $7.5m (the latter figure was implied by Swen) by some time before the release of BG3. If the same ratio (taking the 6m figure you supplied re: DOS2) applied to BG3 (it probably won't, but you wanted to compare), the launch sales were 5m, so we'd expect the sales over 6 years to be 8.5x that, or over 42 million.

That seems laughable until you remember The Witcher 3 sold over 50m copies over a slightly longer period (8 years).

Realistically I suspect it's somewhere in the 12m-18m range right now, but it could be a lot higher, and it can't be much lower than 10m just from the Steam sales. I suspect when Larian start marketing whatever game comes after BG3, they'll mention actual figures then. Be unsurprised if they were 30m in say 5 years. Higher if it gets an expansion.

Plus it's noting that Larian doesn't get the whole $60 from each sale either. Steam, Amazon, or whoever sold the game gets a their cut, and there's overhead and the development costs. I have no idea what they make from each sale. Anyone know? $20 $10? Less? Nothing to sneeze at, but I doubt it's lets buys D&D and get into a whole new type of industry (publishing) money!

We're talking revenue figures, not how much the company actually gets, because the reduction is similar for most companies and those figures are more fiddly to work with.

Steam takes 30%, the rest goes directly to Larian though some percentage goes to WotC (unlikely to be more than 5%*). Most other storefronts take similar amounts to Steam except Epic which takes less.

So no, the era of companies getting only $20 or $10 from game sales is long over, ancient history. That's never been true for digital. That was what was happening when games were $40-$50 and physical only, and particularly when they were on expensive to manufacture cartridges.

* = But whatever it was, it was enough that it seems to be the reason why WotC's "digital licenced games" income went up from $76m to $133m.

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