After seeing massive success on PC and later, the PlayStation 5, Baldur's Gate 3 is finally making its way to Xbox, though Microsoft reportedly passed up the opportunity to launch it on Game Pass.
In a leaked thread of emails and files from Microsoft, the company, including Xbox head Phil Spencer, discussed the projected costs for much of its upcoming Game Pass titles that they pay to release on the platform. Among other games, the projections list Baldur's Gate 3 as a predicted title for the platform with a projected cost of just $5 million. Compared to projections for other games like EA's Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, for which the company expected to pay $300 million, 5 million is very little for a title that has topped the Steam sales charts for weeks.
On top of this, Phil Spencer reportedly referred to the game as a "second-run Stadia PC RPG" last year in reference to its intended release on the failed Google Stadia cloud gaming console. At the time, Baldur's Gate 3 was in early access on Steam and boasted a player count of nearly 900,000 and would see almost universal acclaim from fans and critics alike, reaching the top 10 of Metacritic's "Best PC Games of All Time" list.
According to Michael Douse, the publishing director for Baldur's Gate 3 developer Larian Studios, Xbox's underestimation of the title is not a surprise since the CRPG (Computer RPG) genre is still fairly niche and does not have a lot of data to accurately predict the success of new releases. He mentioned the game's previous CRPG offering, Divinity: Original Sin 2, which saw similar misunderstandings from publishers when it came time for its console ports to release.
Previously, the game's Xbox port was set for an early 2024 release, with Larian citing technical issues with getting the game's split-screen co-op mode to function on the Xbox Series S console. After coming to an arrangement to make split-screen support exclusive to the Series X instead, the release date was moved up, and Xbox players will reportedly receive a port this year after all.
Since the game is made with PC controls in mind, Larian Studios had to make concessions even for the PlayStation 5 port which led to a slight delay between it and the original Steam version as they adapted the control schemes to work on a Dualsense controller. Mimicking its success on Steam, the game has proven to be a top seller on the PlayStation Store as well, with PC crossplay for co-op reportedly on the way.
Baldur's Gate 3 is available now on PC via Steam and PlayStation 5, with a Mac port coming later this month followed by its Xbox release.
Source: GameSpot