OK and finally, to come back to that CD Projekt analogy from earlier: after The Witcher 3, CDPR doubled in size to get Cyberpunk 2077 out. I guess from their point of view, they couldn't shrink and do less than they did with their previous game, and it probably wasn't enough to stay the same. Where do you sit with this kind of consideration - do you feel like after BG3 you have to do more, and get bigger?
Actually there's a strong push within the company now to consolidate in size, because we grew much more than we wanted to.
Oh I see.
We didn't want to grow this much but we had to because this game required it. What we wanted to do was cinematic, triple-A, storytelling RPGs driven by systemics and multiplayer - it's always the same. It's what we want to do. We're getting really good at it.
We didn't expect that we needed so much to be able to do it. Nobody expected, like, lighting people or sound people. You're making a movie, right - you're making a lot of movies - in this case one and a half times all the seasons of Game of Thrones. That's a lot of movies that have to be made. But you need everybody that you need on a movie set. That's a lot of people. That's where that comes from.
At the same time, we wanted to increase the choice, so all teams grew much more than we wanted them to. We didn't expect this growth. So now we want to manage it. We want to consolidate a bit so that we can focus, and then we'll see.
I'm not going to say what the future plans are going to be; they're going to be defined by the success of BG3, defined by the needs of the next game, because each game has its language that you need to learn to talk it. Maybe we'll make a game like Into the Breach - who knows? [laughs]
