For every Baldur's Gate 3 and Among Us, there are thousands of games that never reach that level of popularity. It's a similar survivorship bias as typical VC.
The existing game studio system can already handle all other established niches in practice.
Similarly, nearly every AAA franchise game will do very well. Maybe there are some ups and downs, but overall it's boringly predictable. I can absolutely guarantee that GTA6 will be one of the best-selling games of all time.
Among Us is an actual weird indie hit, yes.
Trajectory was there. BG3 is an iteration of those two games and earlier ones.
D:OS sold 500,000 copies in 3 months, making over $10,000,000 on a development budget of $4 million. Not AAA numbers, but Larian more than doubled their investment.
BG3 whilst undeniably a massive success was likely always going to perform very well for Larian. The suprise was mostly that it ended up being a GOTY title I think.
They've always been good. very good. And you know they're committed for the right reasons because they re-did large parts of DOS2 for free based upon community response.
I can't think of another studio who has willingly done that for people who have already paid.
Go back and play the original divine divinity. It's very good.
BG3 being a masterclass in game development shocked no one who has followed Larian over the years.
For most people $6M budget means VC.
The VC model doesn't make a lot of sense for games. So many outsiders come into games thinking they know what they're doing and they learn some hard (and expensive!) lessons fast. Thanks for writing this.
Indie games are more like self-published novels or youtube creators - you are trying to find a core fan base who will support your artistic endeavors. Sometimes they crossover into mainstream, but 99.99% of the time it remains a niche. At best you can earn a liveble wage that grows over many years.
I have seen many VCs dabble in games and they learn their lesson quick. VR / AR / Metaverse attracted a lot of VC investment, all of which is now burned into nothing.
Games are amazingly difficult to make. Much harder than building web services, but the product success rate is even lower and with much lower stickiness amongst users.
What most silicon valley backed successful VC funded companies fundamentally are, are attempts to get software based network monopolies. Things that users won't immediately abandon for the next new shiny thing down the road.