“Greed has been fucking this whole thing up for so long, since I started,” said Swen Vincke, founder and head of Baldur’s Gate 3 developer Larian, while collecting Game Developers’ Choice award for Best Narrative last week. “I’ve been fighting publishers my entire life and I keep on seeing the same, same, same mistakes over, and over and over.”
Vincke’s speech – an impromptu one, he says – quickly took off, attracting an outpouring of support from developers on social media and echoing the frustration and, at times, outright anger of other developers at those awards. But alongside the understandable sense of indignation at the seemingly endless wave of layoffs hitting the industry over the past year, Vincke’s speech – and the reaction – also highlighted something broader: video games are having a moment of introspection.
Amongst all that – and after the extraordinary success of Baldur’s Gate 3 – Larian has become something of a beacon for the industry. A rare case of not only a fully independent studio but a large one, with hundreds of employees around the world, Larian has sustained that size while producing a game that people genuinely love. Baldur’s Gate 3 swept awards and dominated headlines in a year that also featured a new Zelda game, a new Mario, and new RPGs from Blizzard and Bethesda, but it’s also become a form of living proof for those who’d argue there is another way – and that this way is the path through the industry’s problems.
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