Baldur’s Gate 3’s director says publisher ‘greed has been f***ing up’ the industry and causing layoffs

The CEO of Larian Studios and director of its hit game Baldur’s Gate 3 has blamed corporate greed for the high number of mass layoffs in the video games industry.

Swen Vinke took the opportunity to address the issue while accepting the Best Narrative award for Baldur’s Gate 3 at the Game Developers Choice Awards (as reported by Eurogamer).

“The speeches here have been so good and basically stole all my thunder, of the things I wanted to talk about, about stopping the war and stopping the greed which has been fucking this thing up for so long,” Vinke started, before deciding to continue speaking about the latter.

In his speech, Vinke said corporate greed has been a constant in the industry ever since he’s been involved, and that he sees the same patterns all the time.

“I’ve been fighting with publishers my entire life,” he explained, “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 is the numbers.

“And then you fire everybody and then next year you’re going to say ‘shit, I’m out of developers’, and you’re going to start hiring people again, and then you do acquisitions, and then you put them in the same loop again, and it’s just been broken, and broken and broken.”

Addressing publishers directly, Vinke told them that the situation didn’t have to be like this, and that they don’t have to follow the firing and hiring loop he described.

Further reading

1

A third of developers saw layoffs at their workplace last year, 56% worry it’ll happen this year

A fifth of QA developers say they were personally laid off

“You don’t have to,” he said. “You can just make reserves. Slow down a little 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 all of those people, that you lose every single time, so that you have to go through the same cycle over, and over, and over, right? Because it really pisses me off.”

Baldur’s Gate 3 took home four prizes at the GDC Awards, including Game of the Year, Best Design and the Audience Award.

Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom won the Innovation and Best Technology Awards, while Visai Games’ narrative cooking game Venba also received two prizes, the Best Debut and Social Impact Awards.