“We believe RPGs are big … So we always believed the audience was there,” says Adam Smith
D&D is also as big as its ever been, especially with a latent audience of viewers who maybe don’t play very often, and at a time when there aren’t enough DMs for everyone who wants to play to find a table. Plus, Baldur’s Gate is prime 30-year-nostalgia-cycle bait for millennial+ PC gamers.
Indeed, DnD has been catching my interest but have never known any players, and jumping in the DM role is daunting. BG3 lets me play something very close to DnD without any hassle.
Less of it than Hasbro anticipated, though.
There’s pretty big overlap between the kind of people who play PC games or even a lot of console games and who may be interested in this other genre of games, and especially the biggest name in that genre. It didn’t translate to the general public, though.
Which is crazy to me because the DnD movie was better than both Avatar movies IMO and those are 2 of the top 3 grossing movies of all time
Moviegoers are a fickle audience.
It’s also a great primer for the game itself. It introduces Faerun and (most) of the races while being a fun story in its own right. Although I have played Baldur’s Gate 2 and Neverwinter Nights back in the day I (re)watched the movie before starting BG3 and it was a nice apéritif to the main course.