This past week, my friend Destin Legarie at IGN published a video about a developer who said that Baldur’s Gate 3 shouldn’t “raise the bar” of fan expectations going forward. Some other devs disagreed. Some said this was fan entitlement. It became a whole thing.
My quick take on all that is that yes, I think it’s good for devs to aspire to the kind of greatness that we’re seeing in Baldur’s Gate 3 from a smaller studio. But no, I’m not expecting every developer to hit grand slams with every project at this level either.
For me, the developer/publisher takeaway from all this is a little more plain: If reception to Baldur’s Gate says anything, it’s that people hate microtransactions in their AAA games.
I really can’t understand how publishers and the developers they often issue these commands to don’t understand a common thread with some of the best-selling, best-reviewed games of the year. Baldur’s Gate 3 is certainly the latest and most prominent example, but Elden Ring, both Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. The Witcher 3. The Last of Us Part 1 and 2. No cash shops, substantive DLC, if there is any.
It is easy to imagine Baldur’s Gate having a cash shop where, even if it wasn’t full of game-altering, powerful items (ez res your dead teammates!), it could still be full of cosmetics. Dress up your favorite love interests (or yourself) in gear that looks better than anything in the actual game! But no, they didn’t try. Didn’t bother. Every outfit or armor piece or weapon in the game is found or earned.
Instead of getting more accepting of microtransactions these days because they’ve become so normalized, I’m moving the opposite direction. I genuinely resent Diablo 4 for sinking so, so much work into its $15-30 armor sets in the store when they could have been farmable in the game, and in-game sets are already starting to fall behind in the seasonal model. Destiny 2 has spiraled into insanity with how the game, its seasons, its expansions, its dungeons and everything in its cash shop is overmonetized.
While you can say “oh well, these are live games and they have to make money somehow.” Yes, but this is a symptom of corporate poisoning, often dissatisfied with even huge sales of highly reviewed games because they do not print enough constant cash. Everyone is chasing that Fortnite/GTA Online/mobile game cash. It’s why you have a place like Sony, mega-hit maker of beloved single player games, now saying they are throwing half their cash at live service titles.
I think we are going to start to see even more of a backlash to this. To the battle pass era. To even cosmetic microtransactions that now feel like they’re actively removing loot from games. Games that leave “everything on the table” without feeling the need to do that are going to continue to win big like we’ve seen from Tears, Elden Ring and Baldur’s Gate even in just this year alone. I’m not exactly sure what Starfield’s cash shop situation might be, but if goes the Baldur’s route, people will love it. But if it goes the Fallout 76 route, that will be irritating, especially in a single player game. Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 is also coming for Sony, and that’s a series that is a prime example of taking things that easily could have been microtransactions (new Spider-suits), and making them a fun, earned rewards for gameplay. And surprise, Spider-Man 1 was the PS4’s best-selling original game.
If Baldur’s Gate can teach any lessons to developers or publishers, I hope it’s this one. But if they haven’t learned from Elden Ring and Tears and The Witcher already, I’m not sure there’s much hope of that.
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