Baldur's Gate 3 Dev Thinks Games Shouldn't Be Judged By Their Genre

06.04.2024 - 02:49 / thegamer.com / Michael Douse / Stephen Totilo

You'll struggle to find anyone that wasn't surprised by Baldur's Gate 3's rampant success over the past year. It's an excellent RPG and one of the most ambitious the industry has ever seen, but many assumed that its genre would have been too significant of a barrier for the game to break into the mainstream.

However, Baldur's Gate 3 has completely shattered the perception that CRPGs don't have widespread appeal, and Larian's director of publishing, Michael Douse, believes it's proof that publishers should start "taking more bets" rather than judging a game's potential success based on the genre that they attribute the game to.

Douse made these comments in a recent interview with Game File reporter Stephen Totilo, claiming that Baldur's Gate 3 is proof that "niches don't exist anymore" and that developers and publishers should start taking more risks on projects rather than dismissing certain genres as being too expensive to bet on.

This industry is still obsessed with genres. I mean, we made the most expensive CRPG ever made. If you're a guy whose job it is to say, ‘Well, what projects should we do and what are the risks?’ You're going to look at our game and go, well, ‘It's a f***ing CRPG. Why would we take a bet on this?

Douse then goes on to use one of 2024's biggest hits to drive home his point even further - Palworld. In Douse's eyes, the developers of Palworld "made a game that was unbothered by what a game should be" and reaped the rewards for their efforts, baffled as to why so many people were surprised that a game made for players and sold to players performed well.

Even industry analysts were surprised by the success of Baldur's Gate 3, something which Douse says will become more and more common unless publishers stop judging games by their genre and start looking at how "socially resonant" a game is. He has a point too, as most of the games that have exploded in popularity over the past couple of years have been defined by how much people are able to talk about them online and with friends.

Baldur's Gate 3 gives players an unprecedented amount of freedom and choice, which will naturally lead to discovery and conversations among other players. Palworld lets you find cute monsters and give them guns, a topic which is weird enough to get tongues wagging on its own. Lethal Company and the recently released Content Warning are silly, multiplayer experiences you can have with friends in which anything and everything can happen.

None of these titles are defined by one particular genre, and while you could slot them into one that makes sense, they're not defined by them. Palworld wasn't popular because it was a survival game, and Baldur's Gate 3 isn't popular because it's a CRPG.