Microsoft seemingly underestimated how successful Baldur's Gate 3 was going to be and thought it wouldn't cost much to get it on Xbox Game Pass on release day.
According to leaked files and emails from Microsoft, Xbox leadership called Baldur's Gate 3 a "second-run Stadia PC RPG" in May 2022. This sounds pretty insulting considering that the game's concurrent peak player count was 875,343. Additionally, it holds a current score of 96 on Metacritic.
Microsoft listed the projected cost of getting Baldur's Gate 3 on Xbox Game Pass to be around 5 million. Other games like EA's Star Wars Jedi: Survivor was estimated to be more than $300 million while WB's Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League sat at more than $250 million. The latter has been delayed to February 2024 due to its poor reception during February 2023's Sony State of Play. Its value on Game Pass has most likely gone down since then.
Larian director of publishing Michael Douse commented on the leaked estimation for Baldur's Gate 3. "In their defense, so did everyone else. Same with DOS2. Comes with the genre, and the way we approach things, and the way we execute things," he explained on Twitter. "There just isn’t any existing data that could have told anyone how BG3 was going to perform. We just had to take giant spooky leaps."
Baldur's Gate 3 has had some issues with running on Xbox Series S due to the co-op split-screen feature, so that's the reason why the game hasn't launched on Xbox yet. However, both parties came to a solution that co-op split screen will be present on Series X but not on Series S. Because of this, it's planned to launch on Xbox by the end of 2023.
Due to Baldur's Gate 3's astounding success, Larian surely won't be underestimated in the future.
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