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Larian's Unfair Advantage
- tryptophan 3y agoCrowd funding projects by selling equity? Have we re-invented pre-regulated-to-death stock markets?
- _delirium 3y agoSort of, but only for relatively small amounts of money, to try to avoid the kinds of outrage-producing stories of grandma losing her life savings to a snake-oil investment that led to the regulations in the first place. Regulation Crowdfunding, passed by Congress in 2016, added an exception to the 1933 ban on selling unregistered securities to the general public. Companies may now do so, but with two limits. The company may raise no more than $5m total in a 12-month period through this route. And individual investors are limited to investing no more than 5-10% of their income or net worth, across all crowdfunded companies they invest in, also in a 12-month period (5% for lower incomes and net worths, and 10% for higher). The details on the 5-10% of income or net worth formula are here: https://www.investor.gov/introduction-investing/general-resources/news-alerts/alerts-bulletins/investor-bulletins/updated-11 https://www.investor.gov/introduction-investing/general-reso...
- Turskarama 3y agoLarian have had huge success with crowdfunding and showed how customer investment can bring great success to a game. Then of course there's Star Citizen...
- SXX 3y agoLike it or not, but Star Citizen delivered exactly what majority of whales who donated millions into it wanted: spaceship garage simulator. Some people were happy to pay for their space ship "NFTs".
- Turskarama 3y agoHa! I very much doubt it delivered what they wanted, but they're prepared to pretend it's what they wanted because the alternative is to cry over how much money they wasted.
- nolok 3y agoAt this point, SC is a giant exercise in sunk cost fallacy for the whales. There are so many people who have sunk thousands, tens of thousands for some, in stuff that still only exists as jpeg or text blurb a decade later. The core game they're building is not too bad, it's just not even reaching 1% of the promises, and they SOLD those promises. I'm not betting on whether or not it will be a good game in the end (for many what it offers is already enough to have loads of fun), but there is absolutely no doubt in my mind they won't ever reach 50% of sold features developed, because it's impossible. I've been in enough project to recognize massive feature creep and the need for a proper reset, and SC passed that years ago, now they're in the "you better not release because you're fine as long as it's in dev, but once released the chicken will come home to roost". Another big issue is that, even if they somehow did it all, reached 100% completion, they're sold so much advantage left and right that the game would HAVE to be pay to win. It's already pay to win by design before even existing in its final form. I don't have any right to tell people how to spend their money or what they should enjoy, and I have paid my fair share of "overpriced" stuff I enjoyed, but my main issue is that I was really into the idea of another AA/AAA single player story-driven space game and Squadron 42 seems further away today than ten or five years ago.
- zamalek 3y agoI don't think SC has delivered on $50m (or whatever absurd figure they have now reached) worth of value. However, "SC is a scam" meme hails from years ago and the game has been under continuous development since then. There are now viable and enjoyable gameplay loops. You can do all the things with spaceships. The absurd level of scale has been delivered. But, the game is a mile deep and an inch wide (the exact opposite problem to Elite Dangerous) - there is very little content. It's also a buggy mess. I am also somewhat upset with my purchase - in the intervening years I have grown to have less time, and the gameplay is too realistic/hardcore for a casual. I probably won't be playing it. Regardless, your stance on the game is problematic from a factual standpoint: 2 minutes in the game would prove you wrong to anybody - a result that can be replicated a couple of times each year for free.
- voz_ 3y agoNothing unfair about hard work and quality.
- romusha 3y agoYou never see this kind of article on Scam Citizen
- grawlinson 3y agoMaybe there’ll be an article or two, once it’s released! Oh wait…
- kelsolaar 3y agoXalavier Nelson Jr. of Strange Scaffold seems jealous.
- mk_chan 3y agoIt is indeed an unfair advantage to have bosses who care deeply about the products in addition to revenue!
- readthenotes1 3y ago"that's unfair!" Sounds like something a spoiled 10 year old says...
- slowmovintarget 3y agoLarian built what they have. Brandon Sanderson was not lucky, he worked hard. Companies should align product with customer expectation, the problem is when the product is shares of stock instead of the consumer product.
- SXX 3y agoProblem is that you can't align work of art with "customer expectation" unless you funding book 9 of 10 in some series or someting like that. Your overall fantasy fans won't be able to explain what their expectations are and gamers are much much harder to satisfy...
- Skunkleton 3y agoBaldur’s Gate 3 is a truly great game. It’s interesting to discuss how that may or may not be replicated. Still, we’ve been going through years of mediocre cash grab after mediocre cash grab. So many beloved franchises have been basically ruined by monetization, and developers that either don’t care, or don’t have the freedom to care. Knowing what gamers want isn’t hard. They want games that don’t suck. You might try to build something great, and only end up with something good. But if your only real passion is making money, then the games you make will never be “good” no matter how much money they make.
- SXX 3y agoYou can also try to build something great and end up with a shitty product or just go bankrupt. AAA gamedev is not just about wanting to make a good game and caring - it's all about production pipeline and management. Larian grown to 450 people to build it and it's just internal staff. It's hard to imagine how many more people worked on localization, voice-over, QA / LQA and as countless contractors to on whatever aspects they couldn't do in-house. It can be very well be 1000+ people. I not trying to say it's impossible to make good games, but making one at this scale it is literally like a rocket science.
- 3y ago
- thatcherthorn 3y agoIs it really a good thing to expose retail investors to this much risk?
- User23 3y agoCrowdfunding largely isn't investing, rather it's prepaying.
- SXX 3y agoAuthor bring crowdfunding of Divinity: Original Sin as a reason of Larian success, but truth is that ~$1,000,000 they collected is nowhere enough to make game like that. Though having this kind of investment from 20,000 fans can be enough of proof to secure 2-5x of extra funding to actually build game you promised. Author also forgets what it takes to build fanbase of a size to even have this crowdfunding compaign. Larian was founded in 1996 and they did kickstarter for D:OS in 2013. Majority of game studios rarely live for 10 years even if they manage to release successful title. I wont even start on the fact there been very short timeframe of Kickstarter hype. Today studio without a big name can barely get $100,000 and with current interest rate attracting extra investments is even harder because to make even very small game you need at least $200,000. I talking from experience since I (with co-founders ofc) also trying to build game studio making original hardcore buy-to-play games. We already have not-so-indie team of 15 people, but our burnrate is laughtable compared to any VC startup. Yet making games is extremely difficult business: you need a lot of highly skilled and motivated talent; budgets and deadlines are always insufficient; and even then making deals with publishers is hard and deal negotiation can easily take months while cash gap can easily kill you. Building community big enough for successful crowdfunding will takes years and keeping people who give you money happy is almost impossible. Majority of developers from Kickstarter hype times failed miserably here. It's simply impossible goal to most game developers with tons of loyal fans, let alone some random SaaS startup.
- User23 3y agoPillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire is an interesting counter-example. Once again it was a team of proven industry veterans. They solicited investments, but then wiped out their investor equity with a sweetheart acquisition deal.
- renewiltord 3y agoHaha, this was one of the projects I funded on Kickstarter. Great success. The Enhanced Edition is a fantastic game. And the second game is great too! I loved it. Can't wait to play Baldur's Gate. The best part about this is that they're one of the few developers who are making co-op games. I really appreciate that since I can play with a friend on the couch.
- pixelpoet 3y agoI randomly (not my usual fare) watched a video by IGN on this sentiment and couldn't agree more with everything they said: https://youtu.be/iWdZhKFtxKg https://youtu.be/iWdZhKFtxKg
- paulmd 3y agoLarian’s Unfair Advantage? I have no knowledge of this spell, from which tome was it found?
- thefz 3y agoIt is like an advantage roll, but with 4 dice.
- thefz 3y ago> Like a lot of people, I’m deeply excited about what the lovely folks at Larian accomplished with Baldur’s Gate 3, but I want to gently, pre-emptively push back against players taking that excitement and using it to apply criticism or a “raised standard” to RPGs going forward." This might be one of the most childish takes I have ever witnessed in the wild. "hey, now don't expect quality, it's not like we can deliver it"
- zamalek 3y agoI'm not sure if this is rosey-colored nostalgia glasses, or just being jaded by the garbage that AAA studios have been putting out, but is BG3 actually raising the bar or is it returning to a bar long-forgotten? Either way, the AAA take on Larian's success is extremely telling - especially some of the mocking/hostile takes. They aren't going to learn a damned thing.
- wddkcs 3y agoIt's a return, that's the most galling part. It's a great game, but it's not revolutionary or genre defining. The best part about bg3 is the things it's missing: - no rmt - doesn't require online connection - no missing content loaded as dlc - no apologies from the devs for pushing out an unfinished game... After the many AAA trainwrecks this/last year, everyone should understand game development is hard and most games will likely suck. That's fair. But most games these days suck because they're actively made with anti-consumer practices as their foundation. That's not fair to consumers, and devs need to learn this lesson, because their corporate bosses won't.
- grafzhl 3y agoYou could of course argue that the "unfair advantage" is the lack of shareholders who expect the studio to squeeze every last bit of profit out of the player base, but that's neither here nor there.
- notnmeyer 3y agothis is more or less what the article says.
- constantcrying 3y agoLarian's "unfair advantage" is that they have spent decades creating roleplaying games while avoiding falling into many video game industry "fads". And having a market which is full of potential customers, but almost empty of competition.
- ecf 3y agoSeeing the comments from developers at billion dollar AAA studios made me roll my eyes so hard I almost lodged them into the back of my skull.