There's a lot more to it than just Larian. It's mostly about a niche community developing into a mainstream one, and the public growing tired of the same stuff.
After the golden age of late 90s, CRPGs went into shadows of a very narrow niche until maybe 2012-2013. Larian were unlucky enough to work during that winter, and their games weren't particularly successful, although well known in the niche community. Pure RPGs were always niche, and it was hard for them to survive because the market has been split into AAA and indie, leaving no space for anything in between.
Then the non-mainstream communities like RPG Codex produced several indie RPGs like Age of Decadence which also piqued curiosity of the people outside of the niche who grew tired of the constant stream of shallow same-face sandbox action soups with RPG elements like Skyrim.
Larian in particular decided to have their presence on RPG Codex and 100% cater to their desires. They crowdsourced Divinity Original Sin development and implemented almost every reasonable advice RPG nerds gave them under their own vision. The result was a solid and fun game that was a breath of fresh air in the context of 2014. Since about that time, pure RPGs formed a much larger following that steadily grew over the years.
The current sales are mostly because the genre itself got popular again - without it they couldn't have possibly reached those numbers regardless of the quality of their game, as they never did in the previous 2 decades.
2011-2014 were transformative years after the massive boredom of the "next-gen" treadmill of the mid-late 2000s. CRPG is not the only genre that benefited from that. Military-like sandbox games skyrocketed in popularity, giving birth to various offshoots like Battle Royale; soulslike games multiplied; there was even a short revival of arena shooters, although not really successful.
After the golden age of late 90s, CRPGs went into shadows of a very narrow niche until maybe 2012-2013. Larian were unlucky enough to work during that winter, and their games weren't particularly successful, although well known in the niche community. Pure RPGs were always niche, and it was hard for them to survive because the market has been split into AAA and indie, leaving no space for anything in between.
Then the non-mainstream communities like RPG Codex produced several indie RPGs like Age of Decadence which also piqued curiosity of the people outside of the niche who grew tired of the constant stream of shallow same-face sandbox action soups with RPG elements like Skyrim.
Larian in particular decided to have their presence on RPG Codex and 100% cater to their desires. They crowdsourced Divinity Original Sin development and implemented almost every reasonable advice RPG nerds gave them under their own vision. The result was a solid and fun game that was a breath of fresh air in the context of 2014. Since about that time, pure RPGs formed a much larger following that steadily grew over the years.
The current sales are mostly because the genre itself got popular again - without it they couldn't have possibly reached those numbers regardless of the quality of their game, as they never did in the previous 2 decades.
2011-2014 were transformative years after the massive boredom of the "next-gen" treadmill of the mid-late 2000s. CRPG is not the only genre that benefited from that. Military-like sandbox games skyrocketed in popularity, giving birth to various offshoots like Battle Royale; soulslike games multiplied; there was even a short revival of arena shooters, although not really successful.