Ferk

At least it’s just a “considering”…

I remember back when they scrapped the multiplayer promises they made for Cyberpunk 2077 there was also word about them preparing some separate standalone multiplayer game for the future instead. To me this “considering” is more of an indication that the new game won’t be multiplayer focused (if it has multiplayer at all), rather than a promise of anything.

And that was just the warm up.
850k concurrent players and rising right now…

Even when you care about a product, at the end of the day you still have to put a price tag on it, and you’ll still have to give fair shares to all the people who worked on it, while saving up as much as you can to invest in more well cared products… without making it so expensive that not enough customers will buy it.

Caring about the product, investing on it and producing something that is actually good and that people place in high value (so they are willing to pay more for it) is not incompatible with maximizing profit. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if Larian is profitting quite a bit from all the good publicity (imho, well deserved) they are getting for not having gone down the road of predatory monetization tactics.
Probably they would not have been as successful if they had. So I’d argue they are maximizing profits in the best way an independent game studio can.
Choosing to not participate in Subscription services at the moment is likely also in their best interest, profit-wise. Particularly at this point and with this momentum they are having.

Even if they did hallucinate answers, it wouldn’t be the first game that relies on the “unreliable narrator” trope.