I genuinely wonder how much it matters though. From online discussions you’ll see that Baldur’s Gate 3 is beloved by fans and held up as a benchmark for community engagement and listening to player feedback. It won GotY, had a launch far beyond anything the devs expected, and got incredible rave reviews.
But if you look at the top 20 best-selling games of the year, Starfield is #10 despite a lukewarm reception, numerous issues, and being accessible via Xbox Gamepass, while BG3 isn’t even on the list.
I think it really brings into perspective just how small a minority the people who post online about these things are, regardless of platform. Maybe the Gamers don’t know jack about your job, or maybe all their criticisms are 100% right. If it sells millions of copies either way, who cares?
The occasional salty dev, I 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.