In giving a very public voice to the frustrations of many a gamer and recently-laid-off developer, Baldur’s Gate 3 director Swen Vincke used the game’s recent win at the 2024 Games Developer Conference Awards as an opportunity to blast how the ever-growing greed of the industry is having an overall detrimental effect on its health.
Taking the stage to accept the show’s award for ‘Best Narrative’ on behalf of Baldur’s Gate 3 and his team at Larian Studios, Vincke declared to attendees, as per a recap provided by Eurogamer, “Greed has been f–king this whole thing up for so long, since I started.”
“I’ve been fighting publishers my entire life and I keep on seeing the same, same, same mistakes over, and over and over,” he lamented. “It’s always the quarterly profits. The only thing that matters are the numbers, and then you fire everybody and then next year you say ‘s–t I’m out of developers’ and then you start hiring people again, and then you do acquisitions, and then you put them in the same loop again, and it’s just broken,” Vincke continued.
“You don’t have to,” he proceeded to lament. “You can make reserves. Just slow down a bit. Slow down on the greed. Be resilient, take care of the people, don’t lose the institutional knowledge that’s been built up in the people you lose every single time, so you have to go through the same cycle over and over and over. It really pisses me off.”
Notably, this is not the first time a member of the Larian Studios team has publicly called out the video game industry for continually choosing to chase profits instead of taking care of their human talent.
In giving his acceptance speech following Baldur’s Gate 3‘s Game of the Year win at the 2024 DICE Awards, Larian Studios Director of Publishing Michael Douse blasted how the industry “bad sometimes at showing developers what they’re worth.”
“Many, many people were let go at the start of this year,” said Douse, referring to the ongoing waves of layoffs which have swept the industry in recent months while studio execs continue to profit millions in salary and bonuses. “I want you to know that you are talented and that you matter, and that you are the future of this industry. Don’t let that flame be extinguished by our collective mistakes.”
“I know everyone here is scared because shit’s really f–ked up,” he recognized. “All of your projections are wrong and it’s scary. But we persevere as an industry, we will persevere as an industry, and you will all find your place and you will all be welcomed back with open arms. And we’ll still be making games for the players, and for you, and with these guys.”
To this end, Larian Studios Executive Producer David Walgrave then argued that it was not large production budgets, recognizable casts, or flashy visuals that made a quality game or ensured actual monetary success, but rather one simple factor: Does the player find it fun?
“A lot of people probably want to know what’s the secret to our success,” he posited. “The secret to our success is the decisions that we make come from [asking], ‘What does the player want? What do I think is best for the game? What is the most fun? What is the most crazy people telling us we shouldn’t do this, or can’t do it, or this is too challenging or too hard?’ That usually just gives us a kick up the arse to actually make it happen.”
“The stuff we make at Larian, we ask you to pay one price only for the game, and that’s it,” Walgrave added. “You can own it for the rest of your life. We don’t have shareholders, but we also don’t think about them. And we think there is an expression in dutch that ‘honesty only lasts longest, or something? There’s probably a version in English that makes a lot of sense, but what we have tried to do in the last 20 years is to treat people like we would like to be treated ourselves, as players as gamers.”
“So we don’t make decision where we think ‘This could make us the most money,'” he concluded. “In the long run, building a community, building a player base, building games that are actually fun is going to make you the most money”
