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this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2023
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Dunno if this is the case for wherever you got your sales figures from, but a lot of the places that track best-selling games only track physical releases. Or they might also track digital releases if the publisher provides them to whoever is doing that tracking, but they often don't. BG3 does not have a physical release (yet).
And a quick google seems to back that up. According to Phil Spencer the other day, Starfield has had "over 12 million players". I'm assuming this is a combined figure of sales and people who downloaded it through game pass. So, less than 12 million copies sold, and probably a good deal under that cuz I assume game pass would be a pretty decent chunk of those players reached. If the top result when googling is accurate, BG3 has sold 22+ million copies. Prolly enough to crack that top 20, I'd guess.
Here’s my source. It’s the latter case, they use digital sales figures from the companies that provide them.
You raise a good point: if Larian aren’t sharing sales figures then it’s not possible to definitively compare them. I don’t think the 22M figure is very credible (as the other commenter said it doesn’t match up with the data we do have regarding player count/copies sold, and came completions) but even 5-7M copies sold sounds like it would place BG3 on the list. There’s enough bleakness in the gaming scene as it is, so I’m glad to hear it might not be quite as bleak as I thought.
In this case, I am almost positive Larian just isn't providing those sales figures. Before I didn't spend more than a minute googling how many copies sold, so 22M may definitely be too high, but I would honestly still be surprised if Starfield outsold BG3 at all, even if 11.5M of Starfield's 12M players were purchases, and not game pass, which is a super generous estimate.
But I have more than a minute now, so let's look at steamdb. There are 4 analytics things that provide owner estimations there. The spread on these estimations is insane, ranging from 5.5M to 27.7M. But the two middle ones estimate sales at 13.3 and 14.9M. Both are higher than the 12M players Starfield has reached through both sales and gamepass. But. These are steam specific numbers for BG3. It also launched on GOG, though I'm sure those numbers are nowhere near steams numbers. More importantly, it also launched on ps5, and who knows how many copies sold there.
Or maybe the achievement extrapolation method is the most accurate and it's between 7 and 8 million copies sold. There is still a very good chance even those lower numbers are beating Starfield in overall sales.
Regardless, this is all some nebulous as fuck guesswork, but I feel like it's more likely than not that BG3 straight up outsold Starfield. And even if it did not, Starfield had years of hype behind it, and Bethesda has been one of the biggest names in gaming for many years now. Larian was a niche studio making niche games (yes, the D:OS series was quite succesful, I would stay say they were niche though) so the fact that they're even in competition with the Bethesda juggernauts these days is quite impressive for them.
I would not trust that number. Larian just put out an infographic only days ago saying that 1.3M people completed the game. Using achievement data, we can extrapolate that out to somewhere between 7M and 8M copies sold.
Y’know, it’s possible people buy a game to play offline where you don’t get achievements. The numbers Larian put out could also include EA purchases from like, 5 years ago.
Achievement data is a percentage. Since there were no giveaways, PS+, or Game Pass offerings to skew the data, there's no reason to believe that the percentage would change across other platforms or across people playing the game offline. The achievement we're using is the one for beating the game, as is the finite number of 1.3M that Larian offered in their infographic. Yes, that number does include early access purchases. Why wouldn't it? Those are still copies sold, and they're still included in achievement data.