During this year’s The Game Awards 2023 event, Baldur’s Gate 3 won The Game of the Year award, and here’s what the CEO of developer Larian Studios wanted to say when accepting this precious award.
During Keighley’s event, award winners were given 30 seconds onstage before being told to “wrap” things up. After this music started playing, and those involved were kindly requested to leave the stage. Many devs openly criticized this short time, and producer Geoff Keighley took to X afterward to express his understanding by acknowledging that the speeches were too short.
“By the way – I do agree that the music was played too fast for award winners this year, and I asked our team to relax that rule as the show went on”, Keighley said on X. “While no one was actually cut off, it’s something to address going forward.” Although Keighley said that no one was cut off, it was clear that the CEO of Larian Studios wasn’t done with his speech. During his speech, the CEO was talking about friends and family members who passed away during the development of Baldur’s Gate 3 before being cut off.
On X, Larian’s CEO Swen Vincke has now posted a thread about what he wanted to say in full during his ‘thank you’ speech, thereby also mentioning that 30 seconds is a bit short for a speech. Vincke’s thread is quite extensive (16 posts), and as such, we highly suggest reading the full thread on X. We’ve included some of his posts below.
“I want to thank geoffkeighley and the people that organized the #gameawards for creating an award show so big that it gets mainstream attention”, he wrote. “While 30 secs is a bit short , there’s nothing like the game awards and it’s an incredible achievement.”
In his speech, the CEO thanked those from Larian who usually don’t receive credit. “Over 2000 people are listed in the credits and since I can’t call out everyone, I want to focus on a group of people that don’t always get the credit they deserve.”
“Team QA, team localisation, team customer support, team operations, team publishing, team play testers, and every other developer at Larian, BG3 wouldn’t exist without you and you all deserve to be very proud of this.”
As said, Vincke also mentioned those who sadly enough passed away during the game’s development. “I want to dedicate this award to the friends and family members we lost during development including Jim, our lead cinematic animator who passed away last month and personally to my father who passed away the week before we launched our early access campaign.”
The CEO wanted to end his speech by what making games is all about. “I want to end with a story of a conversation I had a long time ago with a publisher. He told me, luckily for them, games are driven by idealism. He meant it in an exploitative way but he was right.”
He continued, “Games are a unique art form, as important as books, music or movies. Many developers, myself included, make games because they love seeing others engage with their creations in a way only games can offer. They don’t care that much about the money made beyond it being the fuel they need to create new and better games. It’s worth reminding everyone that fuel is but a means, not a goal. Whereto and how we journey are what matter and what we remember.”
Inspiring and nice words from the CEO of Larian Studios for sure.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is available now globally for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S.
