An order of magnitude doesn’t mean anything when the market is much more than an order of magnitude larger.
If you don’t know for an absolute fact that the primary reason that BG3 pushed Larian past niche into a blockbuster success is the IP, you don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s not even sort of ambiguous. The IP was all of the hype. The quality is just why the hype turned into GoTY.
An order of magnitude doesn’t mean anything when the market is much more than an order of magnitude larger.
It does, because who are you selling to if 90% of your audience never heard of the original thing?
If you don’t know for an absolute fact that the primary reason that BG3 pushed Larian past niche into a blockbuster success is the IP, you don’t know what you’re talking about.
You don’t see anything wrong with you asserting the opposite? It’s not even sort of ambiguous? Yes it is! lol. The only way to prove otherwise would be to time travel back to 2017 and revoke the IP from Larian. D:OS2 already sold significantly more than its predecessor, and word of mouth was almost surely going to make their next game sell more than that too, and it turns out things like performance capture help to really pull people into a story-driven game. Most people who picked this game up probably couldn’t even tell you that Baldur’s Gate was a city and only knew that it had two previous iterations because this one has the number 3 in the title.
You don’t have to have played BG1 or 2 to be aware of the new game exclusively because it’s the third.
Again, literally all of the hype was about Baldur’s Gate. Larian was barely mentioned, way down the line, when people eventually got around to “who’s making it anyways?”. It wasn’t even close to the primary driver.
It also came with massive built in world building and mechanics that are better than DOS2. They effectively didn’t even have to design the gameplay. They just had to do the story telling.