So they just have to make good enough games to avoid two complete flops in a row. Which is impossible

BG3 made a lot of committed repeat customers for Larian, I don't think it's impossible their next game will sell very well based on name recognition and good will alone. A guarantee? No. But a safe bet.

It’s the equivalent of the rich billionaires saying if you want a house just work hard and buy one. It’s not hard! Why are the poor people complaining?

If this is the source of your rage posting, that's a lot of misguided anger to point it toward Larian. Are we gonna complain about the one-man developer who quit his job to develop Balatro? Yes he was privileged enough to have savings to dig into, but neither him nor Larian are anywhere in the same ballpark as EA, Microsoft, Ubisoft, etc. They're just the wrong people to get mad at.

Phew! So they just have to make good enough games to avoid two complete flops in a row. Which is impossible but feel free to try and argue that it’s possible.

Are you saying it's impossible not to have two flops in a row?

Divinity original sin 1, 2, bg3. No flops.

Old timey blizzard had hits from Warcraft 1 through WoW, and then I stopped paying attention to them.

FromSoft has put out very good games consistently.

This is just big names off the top of my head.

I feel like you just want mass layoffs to happen. Of course it is not possible to guarantee any number of games wont flop. But the fact is that they budget in a way that allows them to occasionally flop completely without having to strip their teams bare.

Where most companies (especially publically traded) just dump their earnings into bonuses or mass hirings (in the case of sudden success) some companies budget responsibly in a way that allows them to continue to have success without having to go through hiring/layoff-cycles.

Larian Studios currently seems to be one of those as does Pocket Pair.