Last Wednesday, March 20, the Game Developers Choice Awards 2024 were held in San Francisco. You can see the full list of winners here, but to no one’s surprise, the Larian Studios game was the big winner of the night and took home four statuettes. When Swen Vincke arrived on stage to collect the award that Baldur’s Gate 3 won best narrative at the GDC Awards 2024, gave a great and important speech about the state of the video game industry.
Vincke is the CEO of Larian Studios and the game’s director. You can see his speech in this video starting at minute 2:11:18
Of course, the video is in English. That is why we took the trouble to translate part of it into Spanish so that all of you can know the wisdom of his words:
«Greed has been ruining all this for a long time, since I started. I’ve been fighting with dealers my entire life and I keep seeing the same, same, same mistakes over and over again.
It’s always quarterly earnings. The only thing that matters is the numbers. Then they fire everyone and the next year they say ‘shit, I don’t have developers’ and start hiring again. Then they make acquisitions and put them all in the same cycle again, a cycle that is broken.
It does not have to be like that. They can have reservations, slow down a little, reduce greed. Be resilient, take care of people. Don’t lose the knowledge that people have been accumulating that you keep losing over and over again. “This really bothers me.”
The words of Swen Vincke’s speech when accepting the prize for Baldur’s Gate 3 The best narrative has a lot of truth. It is that greed that fueled the current epidemic of layoffs in the video game industry and that They are making 2024 an even worse year than 2023 for the industry.
We accompany you in your opinion, dear Swen. It bothers us a lot too.
