Everyone underestimated Baldur's Gate 3, not just Microsoft, said the executive director of Larian

The information was provided by the Director of Publishing at Larian Studios, Michael Douse, who came to Microsoft's defense after it became known that the company had clearly underestimated the potential success of the game.

It turns out that in May 2022, more than a year before the release of Baldur's Gate 3, Microsoft believed it could secure the game for Game Pass on the day of its release for as little as $5 million.

This estimate was part of a leaked email correspondence among top Xbox executives who were looking for ways to fill what Microsoft's Head of Gaming, Phil Spencer, referred to as "a huge gap" in its software lineup due to the delay of Starfield.

The leak revealed that Microsoft assessed how much it would need to spend to gain access to various third-party games for Game Pass on their release day.

At the top of the estimates was EA's Star Wars Jedi: Survivor ($300 million), in the middle was Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed Mirage ($100 million), and at the bottom of the scale was Baldur's Gate 3 ($5 million).

Given the success of the latter game, Microsoft's $5 million estimate now appears to be a significant underestimation, but Douse from Larian wasn't surprised by that figure. Commenting on a report claiming that Microsoft "completely underestimated Baldur's Gate 3," he said that Xbox wasn't alone in this.

"In their defense, you could say the same about everyone else," he wrote. "The same thing happened with DOS2. It's related to the genre, our approach, and the way we execute things.

There simply wasn't any existing data that could have predicted BG3's success. We just had to take big, bold leaps."

Following the PC release of Baldur's Gate 3 in August, the PS5 version became available in early September. Nevertheless, the postponed Xbox version of Baldur's Gate 3 is set to be launched later this year, after the split-screen multiplayer feature was removed from Series S.