Larian Studios - An Important Lesson

It rather sounds that combining the crowd-funding for Original Sin and the marketing of Dragon Commander seems to have worked out well.

So, what are possible lessons for backers' side? Not asking for special versions especially for physical tiers and minor language versions? However, at least, in this direction, I guess I have a good grasp of understanding the current game market (rather commonsensical?) since most of my pledges are intentionally digital tiers. With both GOG and Steam covered, I think Larian already has good enough distribution routes for the 85%. I'm an exclusively single player person but, Steam shouldn't be too bad for MP and the automatic update function.

For the devs side, it seems they need to have a good initial plan to assign their resources to their core games and DLCs. They need solid core games for metacritic score while leaving their ambitious/experimental factors to DLCs/fan-made content. Personally, I'm not a great fan of numerical scores but their influence on sales seems unignorable.
 
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I'm not sure if it was, but I remember one thing from those days: the game gave Larian a foothold in the game-development business and earned them enough revenue to keep afloat. Coding it and bringing it to the market provided them with a network and experience that helped a lot when Divine Divinity went into production.

Possibly, but Larian wasn't on many gamer's maps until Divine Divinity. DD helped them sell enough copies of the botched Beyond Divinity to not make them vanish as quickly as they came. Divinity II was explicitly marketed as the true successor to DD. RPG's are their core business.
 
RPG's are their core business.

That is certainly true: besides LED Wars and Dragon Commander they've always developed RPG's. If I remember correctly, Larian started on a RPG with Attic Entertainent (the German developers of the Realms of Arkania games) after LED Wars. The studio only then came to my attention. That initial RPG was cancelled however, after which development on Divine Divinity was started.
 
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The tales can be read in the Anthology's book. There were several things in it I didn't know about.
 
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Dragon Commander didn't and won't outsell Divinity 2. It outsold it in the first month because of a PR blitz and the kickstarter page for D: OS. Ego Draconis was the release version of Divinity 2 and he doesn't say that Dragon Commander outsold Ego Draconis in the first month. While Sven seems to like RTS games and dragons, his money is made making fantasy role playing games. Reading between the lines, I think he has realized this.

I hope, hope, hope that he has learned that most people DON'T want to play as dragons. You can't relate to a beast, like you can a humanoid. Hopefully, Original Sin has nothing to do with dragons, except as NPC's or enemies.
 
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Myself I enjoyed quite more play a dragon in Divinity2 than fight dragons proliferating as rabbits in Skyrim.

For sure the game didn't tried picture the dragon huge power much, it clearly involves many problem solved through the use of force fields. But I felt it working well anyway and generating multiple interesting original tricks by mixing human and dragon forms to solve something.

The parts where there was a lot of dragon fights opportunities worked and again provided a good management between human and dragon forms, that parts was only failing a bit because of abuse of respawn or number of fights (I don't remember well what was generating the too high amount of fights in those parts)

I don't think RTS are on the rise, moreover it's not a game genre where fans are avid of new approaches, some are obviously but the large majority seems not. ok that's my vague feeling. And still waiting the Mac version.
 
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