The holding company for Belgian-controlled games studio Larian, which runs its revenue through its Dublin arm, posted a €249m pre-tax profit last year as the major success of its Baldur’s Gate 3 title supercharged its sales.
It’s an Irish site and so they probably want to market this as a success for Ireland and not necessarily that a Belgium-based studio is just using their Ireland branch office for special tax status.
It’s not just a shell company though, as the article highlights they do have their own development staff there.
“Dublin firm behind Baldur’s Gate game” has to be the longest possible way they could have written “Larian Studios.”
Author getting paid per word or what?
It’s an Irish site and so they probably want to market this as a success for Ireland and not necessarily that a Belgium-based studio is just using their Ireland branch office for special tax status.
It’s not just a shell company though, as the article highlights they do have their own development staff there.
They need some staff there to get the the tax benefits lol
Ireland really positioned themselves well for this. Megacorps love it!
We all pay for it though
Doesn’t necessarily need to be development staff, though. They could have just as easily set it up as their HR office with just a couple employees.
I suspect in this case the reason was to hide the name “Larian Studios” to get a click out of people who don’t know.
Wasn’t Larian based in Belgium?
Its likely that Baldur’s Gate has more name recognition among readers of this paper than Larian does, so anchoring on that makes sense.