- Their previous game Divinity: Original Sin 2 was critically acclaimed, very popular for a pretty hardcore CRPG, and had long legs.
- DnD has a lot of brand power and has been strongly in the zeitgeist for years.
- There's a big cohort of millennials who have strong nostalgia for Baldur's Gate and who have plenty of money to buy games (if not time to play them).
- The Early Access release for this game was wildly popular beyond the developer's expectations, and maintained interest for years.
I definitely underestimated the brand power of DnD and Baldur's Gate because they aren't very important to me, personally. But also there have been a load of really good CRPGs in recent years and there seemed to be a pretty low ceiling to how much interest they could get. Tyranny, Pillars of Eternity, Pathfinder: Kingmaker, and a few others were amazing and beloved CRPG games but were lucky to have a tenth of the success of BG3. But those games were generally less accessible, mostly not multiplayer, and again lacked the brand power.
I think you're trying to put too much of its success on "brand power". Social proof is a thing, but it's not powerful enough to overcome a bad game. Just look at what happened to the Call of Duty and Battlefield franchises.
I think it's doing so well because they nailed the execution. The graphics are great. The game hasn't had any opening week disasters despite getting more than 7x the expected numbers. The intro hook of the game really grabs you and keeps you wanting more (which is why everyone's still so excited about it 3 years later). Also, it's FUN to play.
That last one is probably the biggest factor. When was the last time a AAA game was truly fun to play? It wasn't too long ago that online streamers were publishing videos lamenting the lack of good games to play.
Tears of the Kingdom, Resident evil 4, Street Fighter 6
Is that all?
edit: I didn't play the other two games. One's a remake of a game I never played (I never owned playstations) and I don't really play fighting games. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
edit2: this is getting ridiculous.
Metroid Prime Remastered
Diablo IV
Persona 4 Golden
Dead Space Remake
Final Fanatasy XVI
Pikmin 4
Star Wars Jedi Survivor
Hogwarts Legacy
Remnant II
So this year actually seems to be pretty great w.r.t. AAA games, and the next months will be pretty ridiculous, with Armored Core VI, Starfield, Mortal Kombat 1, Forza Motorsport, Alan Wake 2, Spider-Man 2, Cities: Skylines 2, Super Mario RPG... all still being released.
So if anything, there's probably too much AAA games worth playing out there.
You must have missed the 2.2 score that it currently has after being review bombed due to recent development decisions.
On a personal level, I will say that they got the campaign right, but the rest of the game is incomplete. This game should have been released as a public beta — it’s currently not close to being a complete experience, imho.
If you actively make decisions to upset the players, then don't act confused when your player rating tanks.
Games get review-bombed for the silliest reasons nowadays. Often times, a fundamentalist minority of gamers feels overly protective about "their" franchise, reacting to even the tiniest disturbance with maniacal anger. If a game has a high score from critics and a low score from users, to me that's actually a good sign that the game might even try something interesting (Last of Us II would be an example here). Of course, the critics score for Diablo IV was the post-release score, not including these new patches, so it might very well be that it really is worse now...
It's worth noting that Diablo 3 went through similar pains upon release; though with less "read the room" type issues like they're having now.