Baldur's Gate 3 studio lead explains the formula for success in the games industry

In a speech at The Game Awards 2024, Larian boss Swen Vincke delivered a critique of the modern video games industry while underlining the push-pull dynamics of publisher-developer relationships.

Gaming isn't in the best place right now, and while the industry has raked in around $184 billion in 2024, global growth is flat. So how do you make it in the tough market?

Swen Vincke, the boss of Baldur's Gate 3 developer and Game of the Year winner Larian Studios, shares the secret for success. It's really all about passion and respect across the entire product stream, from software development to publisher distribution and then eventually end-user play. Selling a bunch of copies really lies in a team's passion and skill, but also the fine and often precarious relationships between the funding publishers and the critical, but spend-happy, creatives.

At TGA 24, Vincke delivered an interesting speech that laid out some basic principles: respect developers and gamers, limit intrusive monetization, see video games as creative experiences rather than a means of boosted revenue.

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.

The studio 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 as a brand. They didn't have to meet arbitrary sales targets or fear being laid off if they didn't meet those targets. And 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.

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 shortsighted in function of 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 realized 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.