"Guess I'll just piss on the floor": Baldur's Gate 3's top TikTok tips

gamesindustry.biz:

There's no shortage of success stories surrounding Baldur's Gate 3, and Larian Studios creative content manager Ben Maltz-Jones added to the stack in a Game Developers Conference session titled "Roll Play: The Strategy Behind Baldur's Gate 3 on TikTok."

Since taking over the official Larian Studios TikTok channel in September of 2022, Maltz-Jones has grown the account from 591 followers to more than 280,000, with a cumulative total of 4.7 million likes spread across more than 100 TikToks uploaded to the site.

Maltz-Jones said it also helped extend the demographics to which Larian was targeting its marketing, as its TikTok viewership skews more female and "quite a bit younger" than its followers on other social media platforms.

"This wouldn't have been possible without Larian leadership giving me a ridiculous amount of freedom to try and fail," Maltz-Jones said, "and I don't think it would have been nearly as successful if they hadn't allowed me the room to experiment."

When he first started running the TikTok account, Maltz-Hones said he was the only full-time social media person on the staff, "so it was important to be able to do a lot of stuff without continual assistance to not burden everybody else."

He very quickly had to learn how to capture and edit footage from builds of the game so he could conceive of an execute on ideas himself. Fortunately, he said Larian had excellent debug/UI tools for that, letting him hide the game's interface and freely move the camera around the game as needed to capture the shots he needed.

"The sooner you can learn to capture things yourself and not have to explain why it's important that you make a character look exactly like Shrek and then kick somebody else off a cliff, the better, really," he explained.

Anyone can run a TikTok, Maltz-Jones said. The key is just knowing how to play to the platform's strength and understanding its weaknesses.

To grasp those two qualities, he suggested reading up on the platform and using it regularly,