Larian CEO Swen Vincke has been reading Ubisoft director of subscriptions Philippe Tremblay's thoughts from yesterday about how players need to "get comfortable" with renting their games as a package, rather than "having and owning" an individual copy. His broad takeaway is: that ain't it, chief. In a social media thread today, Vincke wrote that "it's going to be a lot harder to get good content if subscription becomes the dominant model and a select group gets to decide what goes to market and what not". He feels that "direct from developer to players is the way". As such you shouldn't expect Baldur's Gate 3, Divinity: Original Sin 2 or any other Larian RPGs to join the Game Pass bandwagon anytime soon.
Baldur's Gate 3 director and Larian Studios founder Swen Vincke has decided to share his views on the whole ‘subscription services eventually becoming the dominant way people access their games’ thing, offering a pretty admirable justification as to why you won’t see BG3 being distributed in that fashion.
In case you’re out of the loop, Ubisoft’s director of subscriptions Philippe Tremblay recently kicked off a bit of a discourse by suggesting in an interview with GiBiz that players need to get more comfortable with the idea of not owning their games in a traditional fashion in order for subscription services to continue to take off in the gaming space. As you might expect, this hasn’t gone down too well with a lot of folks in and around the industry.
One of the most interesting responses to it so far has come from Vincke, who’s posted a lengthy twitter thread explaining his stance on the issue of subscription services versus the traditional method of pitching and releasing a game.