Swen Vincke's Speech at the Game Awards
If you love video games and you haven’t seen this yet, you need to stop what you’re doing right now and take three minutes out of your day to watch this. Swen Vincke, head of Larian Studios, made Baldur’s Gate 3, one of the most highly regarded, and best-selling, video games of the last two decades. He won Game of the Year at the Game Awards in 2024, but was told to “wrap up” his speech and ushered off stage in what has to be one of the most shameful scenes at an games industry celebration ever. In 2025, he came back and delivered this speech:
How to make a great video game. Words to live by:
The studio made their game because they wanted to make a game that they wanted to play themselves. They didn’t make it to increase market shares. They didn’t make it to serve a brand. They didn’t have to meet arbitrary sales targets or fear being laid off if they didn’t meet those targets.
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. They realized that if the developers didn’t have fun, nobody was going to have any fun.
And 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.