The studio behind the biggest video game of 2023 says it won't make a sequel despite its enormous success
"Baldur's Gate 3" creators, Larian Studios, says it won't make any new content even though it was the biggest game of 2023.
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- Larian Studios announced it's not making additional content or a sequel for "Baldur's Gate 3."
- "Baldur's Gate 3" was the biggest game of 2023, raking in $650 million.
- Larian's CEO said there is pressure to make more content but that the team's heart wasn't in it.
"Baldur's Gate 3" is not getting any downloadable content or a sequel — at least not from Larian Studios.
Larian Studios, the company behind "Baldur's Gate 3" — last year's biggest game — announced recently that it does not plan to make any additional content for the game or a sequel.
Larian Studios has produced all of the "Baldur's Gate" video games, which are set in the world of Dungeons & Dragons. Larian's first release was in 1998.
The news comes as a surprise given the enormous success of "Baldur's Gate 3" in 2023. The game swept the The Game Awards and has brought in at least $650 million so far. Players also spent an insane amount of time playing the game — collectively more than 8,000 years on the character customization screen alone in its first four months after release.
The games, however, adhere to D&D lore, and so all of its intellectual property is owned by games publisher Wizards of the Coast, which Hasbro owns.
Larian CEO Swen Vincke told IGN that all of the characters created by Larian now "belong to Wizards now."
"I hope that they're going to honor the legacy and get really good people on them, but as far as we are concerned, the chapter is closed. There's closure for us," Vincke told IGN.
Vincke said that the company originally intended to work on creating additional downloadable content for "Baldur's Gate 3" because it seemed like the "obvious thing to do" given the game's success. After spending some time on additional content and even having an early discussion about Baldur's Gate 4, the studio realized that something felt off, Vincke told IGN.
"You could see the team was doing it because everybody felt like we had to do it, but it wasn't really coming from the heart, and we're very much a studio all about being from the heart," Vincke said.
Staff members were "elated" when Vincke announced in December that the studio was moving on from "Baldur's Gate" to work on other projects, he said.
Creating large video games like "Baldur's Gate 3" is a huge commitment for a studio. "Baldur's Gate 3" spent six years in development, coordinating with 240 different voice actors, before it saw the light of day.
Santa Monica Studios, which is behind the popular "God of War" series, also voiced similar concerns about that kind of commitment when it announced that it wouldn't be making more direct sequels in 2021.
The studio released the first "God of War" in 2018. It was also a massive success, similarly sweeping The Game Awards, selling more than 23 million copies, and bringing in more than $500 million. Santa Monica quickly began working on "God of War: Ragnarok," which came out in 2022 and sold some 15 million units. The studio most recently released free downloadable content for the game in December 2023.
Game director Cory Barlog told Gamespot in 2021 that one of the reasons they decided to stop making more content after "Ragnarok" is the massive amount of time the games take to develop.
"The first game took five years," Barlog told Gamespot. "The second game, I don't know how long it's going to take, but I'm just going to throw out that it's going to take close to a similar time to do this. And then you think, 'Wow, a third one...' we're talking a span of close to 15 years of a single story."
While Larian is not creating any new content for the game, Vincke told IGN that there is still some content in the works that will be released during future updates, like new ending cinematics.
Larian Studios did not immediately return a request for comment from Business Insider.