Industry Notes

Larian walked away from a 20-million-copy IP. The Divinity bet is the bigger story than the next game.

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In December 2025, Larian Studios used The Game Awards stage to announce that its next major RPG would be called, simply, Divinity — set in Rivellon, the universe of the studio’s Divinity: Original Sin series. Five months later, in March 2026, Swen Vincke confirmed the game had cleared the early prototype phase and now had a “playable foundation.” Realistic shipping window: not before 2028, probably closer to 2030. The headline story coming out of TGA was the announcement itself. The more interesting story is the decision underneath it — Larian declined to make Baldur’s Gate 4, walked away from Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast, and chose to go back to a universe with a quarter of BG3’s audience that the studio actually owns.

The decision the announcement didn’t explain

Baldur’s Gate 3 has sold over 20 million copies — up from 15 million at the end of 2024 and still trending up through patches and word of mouth. It is, by an order of magnitude, the most successful CRPG of all time. Wizards of the Coast’s parent Hasbro reportedly earned $90 million on the licensing arrangement alone. The natural commercial move, the move every other AAA studio would make at this scale, is to spend the next decade extending the asset: Baldur’s Gate 3 expansions, a Baldur’s Gate 4, perhaps a related D&D spinoff. Larian’s existing pipeline, tools, and audience are all configured for that.

Instead, the studio parted ways with Wizards of the Coast shortly after BG3 shipped, explicitly declined to make DLC or a sequel, and announced in April 2025 that Patch 8 would be the final major content patch for the game. Twelve new subclasses, cross-platform play, photo mode, modding toolkit updates — then a graceful exit from the franchise. Larian closed the door on BG3 fourteen months after it shipped.

That’s not how 20-million-copy IPs usually get handled.

What the bet actually is

There are two ways to read the Divinity decision. The first is that Larian and Wizards of the Coast couldn’t agree on creative or commercial terms for BG3 follow-up content — public reporting hasn’t surfaced the specifics, but the parting was clean and definitive enough that something structural broke. The second is that Larian had a strategic preference for owning the IP outright that overrode the commercial logic of riding the BG3 audience.

Both reads can be true. The decision itself only makes sense if Larian’s working assumption is that ownership of the IP matters more than the audience size attached to a borrowed one. Divinity: Original Sin 2 sold somewhere around 5 million copies — a fine CRPG performance, but a quarter the size of BG3’s audience. Going back to Divinity means starting the audience-build from that smaller base, with the additional risk that some portion of BG3 players who came for the Dungeons & Dragons framing won’t follow Larian into Rivellon.

The trade is: rent the most successful CRPG IP in history versus own a smaller IP that the studio can iterate on indefinitely without third-party approval cycles. Larian made the second pick. The Bloomberg framing — “Divinity will be ‘Next Level’” — is marketing copy on top of a structural strategic decision that the announcement didn’t articulate.

The Warsaw signal

Less covered but more important than the Divinity reveal: Larian opened a new studio in Warsaw in late 2024 to support development of not one but two new RPGs. The Warsaw expansion follows Larian’s existing studios in Ghent, Dublin, Kuala Lumpur, Quebec, and Barcelona — a five-office structure plus Warsaw makes six. For a CRPG-focused studio that had roughly 250 employees pre-BG3, that’s a significant scale-up.

Two simultaneous projects is the operational tell. Larian isn’t optimising for the safest BG3-comparable launch in five years; the company is structuring for two parallel franchises and the headcount needed to ship them. Whichever of the two projects is “Divinity” gets the announced name and the TGA stage. The other one is also being built, also being staffed for, and is presumably either a smaller-scope game between the Divinitys or a separate IP that diversifies the studio’s portfolio risk.

The audience question — does the BG3 audience follow Larian to Divinity — only applies to one of the two pipelines. The dual-track structure is a hedge.

What the BG3 audience does next is the actual test

Patch 8 in April 2025 was the kind of long farewell most live-service publishers wish they could ship. New content, new mechanics, cross-play, photo mode — and a public commitment to stop adding new content afterwards. Modding tools and the toolkit updates mean the BG3 community continues post-Larian: Nexus Mods now hosts thousands of community add-ons, total-conversion ambitions are being floated by mod teams, and the game’s long tail is being handed to its audience rather than monetised by the studio.

Two things to watch as Divinity approaches:

How much of the BG3 audience Larian retains through the gap. A five-year wait between a 20-million-copy hit and the studio’s next major release is structurally hard. The Witcher 3-to-Cyberpunk 2077 gap was five years. The Red Dead Redemption-to-RDR2 gap was eight. In both cases the parent studio used the interval to push a different project as a holdover (Cyberpunk, GTA V Online). Larian’s holdover, if either of the two pipeline games is a smaller-scope title, might fill that role.

Whether Divinity reads as “BG3 successor” or “Divinity: Original Sin 3.” The audience reception will hinge on which framing wins. If Larian markets Divinity as a continuation of the BG3 experience — same depth of choice, same companion writing, same encounter design — the audience question becomes “can we transfer 20 million players to a new IP?” If it markets as a Divinity series sequel, the question becomes “can we grow the existing Divinity audience to BG3 scale?” The two framings ask the audience to do different things.

The right read of Larian’s strategy is probably that the studio is betting it can do both — that the BG3 audience trusts the studio more than they trust the D&D IP, and that the trust transfers to whatever Larian builds in any universe it controls. The five-year timeline buys the room to test that bet. Whether the audience makes the jump is the genuinely open question, and it’s the part Divinity’s announcement explicitly didn’t resolve.

Sources