At the stage of The Game Awards 2024, Baldur’s Gate 3 boss Swen Vincke explained all of us how the coveted award is earned.
With the 2024 Best Community Support award, Larian’s RPG giant has got yet another The Game Awards victory, one year after Baldur’s Gate 3‘s incredible sweep that included the coveted Game of the Year title and more.
Baldur’s Gate 3 gets the award for the Best Community Support in 2024. | Credit: Larian Studios.Game director and studio CEO Swen Vincke used his acceptance speech to make some strong points about the state of the game industry today and what truly makes a title a Game of the Year winner.
Baldur’s Gate 3 boss Swen Vincke calls out money-minded game studios
Swen Vincke, the CEO of Larian Studios, took the stage at the Game Awards not only to accept an award but also to present one, the most prestigious of all: Game of the Year. However, he first used his time in front of the microphone to discuss his thoughts on the state of the video game industry today and the areas where things have gone wrong.
AhahahahahagahagZAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!! Thank you all!!!!!!!!! https://t.co/o1S77a3h1v
— Swen Vincke @where? (@LarAtLarian) December 13, 2024
Vincke began by stating that he would not only be the first to know who would win that night’s game of the year, but he would also know who would win the following year and the year after that. However, it was quite a surprise as no one expected Astro Bot to win this award against the likes of Black Myth: Wukong.
He claimed to have heard this information from an oracle who warned him of impending change. He stated that as per the oracle, the Game of the Year 2025 is “going to be made by a studio who found the formula to make it up here on stage.” Vincke continued:
It’s stupidly simple, but somehow it keeps on getting lost. A studio makes a game because they want to make a game they want to play themselves. They created it because it hadn’t been created before. They didn’t make it to increase market share. They didn’t make it to serve the brand. They didn’t have to meet arbitrary sales targets, or fear being laid off if they didn’t meet those targets.
Vicnke also stated that the people in charge forbade them from cramming the game with anything whose only purpose was to increase revenue and didn’t serve the game design. They didn’t treat their developers like numbers on a spreadsheet and they didn’t treat their players as users to exploit.
And they didn’t make decisions they knew were short-sighted in function of a bonus or policy. They knew that if you put the game and the team first, the revenue would follow. They were driven by “idealism” and wanted players to have fun, and they realized that if the developers didn’t have fun, nobody was going to have any fun.
This is not Swen Vincke’s first time at TGA
TGA 2024 introduced a new award called the Game Changer Award. | Credit: The Game Awards 2024.Vincke has previously voiced his opposition to profit-driven business practices that have caused the videogame industry to collapse in recent years. He denounced the corporate “greed” that has ruined game studios in March. “I’ve been fighting with publishers my entire life, and I keep on seeing the same mistakes, over and over and over. It’s always the quarterly profits. The only thing that matters is the numbers,” Vincke said.
The issue has become so urgent that even Geoff Keighley, the host of the 2023 Game Awards, who was criticized for ignoring it, directly addressed it in an early segment of the program. For his efforts in helping laid-off game developers find new jobs in the industry, Amir Satvat was actually given the first-ever Game Changer award at The Game Awards.
Wrapping the speech up, Vincke describes Larian’s Game of the Year victory from the previous year as “life-changing,” and he tells the winner of this year’s contest—which was Team Asobi for Astro Bot—that “you have no idea what’s waiting for you. It’s an incredible honor, and you’re in for a heck of a ride.”
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