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- Swen Vincke, CEO of Larian Studios, criticized the video game industry at The Game Awards 2024.
- He argues the industry prioritizes money and fame over creating fun, well-made games.
- He believes successful games are made with passion and respect for developers and players.
If you’re reading this, you may still be young, and you may think that the video game industry is at its peak, that nothing existed before what there is now, and that it’s the pinnacle.
But the reality is that this industry is almost entirely prostituted by fame and money, leaving fun, gameplay, stories, and community as something secondary. Luckily, some studios and games aren’t like that, and players tend to reward them.
At The Games Awards 2024, Swen Vincke, CEO of Larian Studios, had to present the most important award given to this video game industry, and his forceful speech may go down in history.
And not just the event but also the industry itself. It’s all about money, fame, recognition, ego-boosting, and personal satisfaction for a group of people who don’t pretend to follow the basic guidelines of any video game: it has to be fun and provoke emotion, it has to be well-made, and it has to be affordable for everyone.
Swen Vincke Rails Against Video Game Industry In Speech At TGA2024
And he fell short because he surely had much more to say. When he went up on stage to present the GOTY 2024, Swen Vincke used his minutes to make a call to sanity with a powerful message:
“The Oracle told me that the game of the year 2025 was going to be made by a studio, a studio who found the formula to make it up here on stage. It’s stupidly simple, but somehow it keeps on getting lost. 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, said the Oracle.”
Corporate Greed, Exploited Developers, Soulless Games
This is not, nor will it ever be, the first time that Swen Vincke has attacked the video game industry. On other occasions, the CEO and main promoter of Baldur’s Gate 3 has criticized them, calling them greedy, and that no matter what happens, mistake after mistake, the industry continues to encounter the same problems over and over again, there is no learning, only the next fiscal quarter, accounting, and the economy matter.
No one will deny that this is important. Still, before, in the eighties and late nineties, there was more freedom, more creativity, more passion, and less money, and numbers were equally important. Still, the philosophy of work and respect was much better.
Films like Ready Player One go hand in hand with Vincke’s statements, who vindicates that spirit, which should not be lost in an industry like video games, which is pure fantasy coming from the minds of brilliant people who are increasingly boxed in by the parameters set for them and with ever-increasing pressure.
The speech will change little to nothing, but perhaps it has served to make some people, at least, reflect on how this video game industry is developing, and precisely, if anyone knows, it is Swen Vincke.
What’s your take on Vincke’s speed at TGA2024? Share your thoughts in the comment section below.
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Sajjad Hussain is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Tech4Gamers.com. Apart from the Tech and Gaming scene, Sajjad is a Seasonal banker who has delivered multi-million dollar projects as an IT Project Manager and works as a freelancer to provide professional services to corporate giants and emerging startups in the IT space.
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