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Baldur’s Gate 3 director Swen Vincke has been public with his criticisms of the games industry, and that doesn’t seem likely to change. He had some choice words for publishers when he took the stage at the Developer’s Choice Awards, blaming industry-wide layoffs on corporate greed.
Baldur’s Gate 3 director Swen Vincke blames greedy and shortsighted publishers for game industry layoffs
The last year and a half saw massive layoffs from multiple AAA studios. As Eurogamer reported, the 2024 Game Developer’s Conference saw no shortage of complaints about the state of the industry. Vincke wasn’t the only one, but he didn’t mince words when he accepted Baldur’s Gate 3’s GDC Award for Best Narrative.
“Greed has been fucking this whole thing up for so long.” the Baldur’s Gate 3 Director said. “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, and 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, ‘Shit, 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.”
“You don’t have to,” Vincke continued. “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.”
The Baldur’s Gate 3 director wasn’t the only one with something to say.
“This past year,” said presenter Xalavier Nelson, “unfortunately, the most common narrative brought to us by the games industry is that making fantastic games requires layoffs and the destruction of human lives. This story is not only cruel, but it is definitively and provably false.”
Host Alanah Pearce and Independent Game Festival chairperson Shawn Pierre also criticized the layoffs and the industry’s lack of respect for developers.