People keep pointing at Baldur’s Gate 3 like it rewrote the commercial reality of traditional CRPGs, But It didn’t, BG3 is a MASSIVE outlier due to the fact that It pulled in a ton of people who normally never touch the genre because of the D&D brand, high production values, solid multiplayer, cultural timing, and accessibility features, but That success does not change the underlying distribution of the genre.

Look at the next-best results and the numbers fall off a cliff: Divinity: Original Sin 2 was a genuine success for a CRPG but not a breakout hit and Most other modern CRPGs like Pathfinder sit significantly lower.

Publishers looking at risk and scale still see a relatively limited, dedicated audience for pure or near-pure versions of the genre

.Former BioWare staff often frame EA as simply not “getting” Dragon Age because it was “too niche, too backwards, too old-school.”which sucks but its Kinda true. Hell, Dragon Age: Origins itself needed, edgy marketing with heavy blood, sex and Marilyn Manson’s “This Is the New Shit” just to generate wider interest., Then the sequels systematically moved away from the CRPG genre:

DA2 shifted toward action combat, a voiced protagonist, and tighter scope. Inquisition went further into open-world action-RPG territory. Veilguard completed the pivot into a more conventional action-RPG.

BG3 proved the ceiling for a traditional approach can be extremely high when everything aligns but It did not prove that the genre stopped being niche or that every studio can (or should) expect those numbers from a single player CRPG