Baldur's Gate 3 boss Swen Vincke calls out industry layoffs, "short-sighted" decisions, "arbitrary sales targets," and more in his latest Game Awards speech: "Change is coming"

A year after Baldur's Gate 3's massive Game Awards sweep, which saw it take home the coveted Game of the Year award and more, Larian's RPG behemoth has secured another win with the 2024 Best Community Support award. In his acceptance speech, game director and studio CEO Swen Vincke had some powerful statements to make about the current state of the games industry, and what truly makes a Game of the Year winner. 

Kicking things off, Vincke says that he already knows the Game of the Year winners for the following three years. "How do I know this? Well, an oracle told me. She said, 'Change is coming,'" he says.

Jokingly, he says this oracle also "made me sign an NDA," but he continues: "The oracle told me that the Game of the Year 2025 was going to be made by a studio who found the formula to make it up here on stage. It's stupidly simple, but somehow, it keeps on getting lost."

This future winner, he says, "made their game because they wanted to make a game that they wanted 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 mean those targets." Considering the dreadful state of layoffs in the industry over the past few years, these words hit hard – just last week, it was announced that up to 177 Ubisoft devs were impacted following the closure of two offices.  

"Furthermore, 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," Vincke continues. "They didn't treat their developers like numbers on a spreadsheet. They didn't treat their players as users to exploit. And, they didn't make decisions they knew were short-sighted and functioned for a bonus or politics. They knew that if you put the game and the team first, the revenue will follow. They were driven by idealism, and wanted players to have fun, and they realised that if the developers didn't have fun, nobody was going to have any fun." 

"They understood the value of respect, that if they treated their developers and players well, those same developers and players would forgive them when things didn't go as planned. But above all, they cared about their game because they loved games. 'It's really that simple,' said the oracle."

Wrapping things up, Vincke says that Larian's Game of the Year win last year was "life-changing," and said to this year's winner (which hadn't been announced at that point, but ended up being Team Asobi for the delightful 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." 

Be sure to check out our roundup of everything announced at The Game Awards 2024 so you don't miss a thing.