They don’t deserve that much for it (Larian does)
Some percentage of revenue for using other people’s IP is pretty normal.
And I think it’s hard to argue Baldur’s Gate and using DnD isn’t a meaningful part of its success. Divinity Original Sin 2 is a really good game with a lot of the same DNA (it’s why I personally bought BG3), and it stayed pretty niche. The IP is a big part of it exploding.
I would agree that it being DnD was part of its success but I still don’t think Hasbro deserves 90m for it
But they got a percentage, would you have been happier if they only got ten million but a lot leas people bought the game? Idk what deal they had, however the game was great and a lot of people loved it. And so hasbro got a lot of money, this will hopefully encourage them to lease out more IPs.
I’d argue it had far more to do with it being another one of Larian’s RPGs with significantly more production value.
You’re underselling how massive the Baldur’s Gate name is.
The exact same production in DOS3 wouldn’t have near the same runaway hype train.
I’m a recent D&D fan, largely because of BG3. What’s the tl;dr for why people hate Hasbro and Wizards? Hopefully a slightly longer explanation than just the word “greed”.
Jan last year they were going to destroy the 3rd party D&D content creation ecosystem (it was legally debated whether they could anyway) it caused a mass boycott of D&D content and all 3rd party creators (including Critical Roll) to start diversifying. It went on for two weeks, only finally causing them to rollback on it because a campaign to cancel all ongoing D&D beyond subscriptions made them take it seriously.
They’ve been pushing to make a closed garden platform vtt for all their first party digital content, that it seems they’ve just started to rollback on.
Prior to that they’ve been consistently milking and trying squeeze the D&D playerbase and MTG community in more and more shitty and exploitative moves.
To say that community good will and faith in them is below zero is not an exaggeration. The main hardcore community have a very jaded and negative view of Wizards and Hasbro. Really to learn more I recommend crawling through YT of all the news. There’s just no way to do it justice here.
Full disclosure: I’ve never played dungeons and dragons so I’m probably not the best person to ask, I’ve just kinda followed the story after playing bg3
My understanding is that since its creation, DnD has been “open source.” Anyone could make content for the game…like campaigns and maps and stuff and it was fine. A lot of people credited that policy with the success and proliferation of the game - I don’t know if it’s true but I believe it since a lot of my exposure to it has been creative projects.
Last year, Hasbro (who owns Wizards of The Coast who owns DnD and Magic: The Gathering) was going to change* that policy so they get a cut of the sale of said content. Pretty much everyone hated this and it got walked back.
- I do not remember if they SAID they were changing it, a memo got leaked, or a fake memo got leaked. So they might not have “walked it back” so much as confirmed that the policy was not changing
I don’t know much, but I heard Hasbro has fired all the guys who created D&D (after they bought the licence). Those guys helped a lot Larian during BG3 development (Larian even tried to speak about them when they won at the Game Awards, but were cut off before they could).