Obsidian Dev Says They Stopped Making Baldur’s Gate-Style RPGs Because Retailers Claimed Players Didn’t Want Them
You may remember that after the golden age of classic role-playing games made with BioWare’s Infinity Engine, such as Baldur’s Gate, Planescape: Torment, and Icewind Dale, their developers started moving on to other things.
But it wasn’t really the developers’ fault; it was the players’. According to game retailers, no one wanted those types of games anymore, and they weren’t selling enough copies. This shift in demand eventually pushed studios to change direction.
Why Developers Abandoned Infinity Engine Games
“The reason we stopped making Infinity Engine games was because retailers told us no one wanted to buy them,” explained Josh Sawyer, a legendary RPG designer and current studio design director at Obsidian. At the time, he had worked on Icewind Dale. Sawyer shared this story during his talk at GCAP 2025 in Melbourne, Australia.
“We asked if we could see the research and they basically told us to trust them,” he added, making the audience laugh.
It was a time when physical stores had a lot of control over the video game market, as buying games online was still uncommon. If a retailer decided not to display a game, it would end up selling very few copies. Developers had to follow the retailers’ demands or risk being left out of the market, often leading to thousands of unsold copies that studios had to buy back.
It’s also true that if stores were saying such things, it was likely because those titles really weren’t selling well, and players were choosing other types of games. Retailers had no reason to avoid stocking Infinity Engine games if there had been strong demand for them.
Sawyer also noted that today, with digital distribution, developers have much more freedom to choose the games they want to make. Failures still happen, of course, but at least now it’s possible to publish any game on platforms like Steam.
In other RPG news, Larian Studios almost made Baldur’s Gate 4, reaching a playable state before canceling it due to concerns about long development times.
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