Baldur’s Gate 3 boss blasts publisher “greed” behind layoffs

The director of Baldur’s Gate 3, Swen Vincke, was one of many to speak out on the recent mass layoffs within the video games industry at an industry awards show last night, blaming the job losses on corporate “greed” that had been “fucking this whole thing up for so long”.

Held as part of the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco, the Independent Games Festival Awards and Game Developers Choice Awards were full of criticism for companies that had made workers redundant over the past 18 months, during what has widely been regarded as the worst period ever seen for job security in the video games industry.

“Greed has been fucking this whole thing up for so long, since I started,” Vincke said, while collecting the GDCA Best Narrative award for Baldur’s Gate 3. “I’ve been fighting publishers my entire life and I keep on seeing the same, same, same mistakes over, and over and over.

“It’s always the quarterly profits,” he continued, “the only thing that matters are the numbers, and then you fire everybody and then next year you say ‘shit I’m out of developers’ and then you start hiring people again, and then you do acquisitions, and then you put them in the same loop again, and it’s just broken…

“You don’t have to,” Vincke went on. “You can make reserves. Just slow down a 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 the people you lose every single time, so you have to go through the same cycle over and over and over. It really pisses me off.”

Vincke’s comments were echoed by Xalavier Nelson Jr, studio head of Hypnospace Outlaw developer Strange Scaffold, who presented the Baldur’s Gate 3 boss with the award.

“Narrative is the glue that holds a project together, the context and framing, characters and worlds that transform a good game into something transcendant,” Nelson Jr said. “This past year, unfortunately, the most common narrative brought to us by the games industry is that making fantastic games requires layoffs and the destruction of human lives. This story is not only cruel, but it is definitively and provably false.”

Criticism of the layoffs came not only from awards presenters and winners, but also from the GDCA show’s host Alanah Pearce, who currently works as a writer at PlayStation’s God of War studio Sony Santa Monica.

“People in this room have lost their jobs,” Pearce noted. “People who normally attend GDC every year have had to cancel because coming here is sort of an extravagant luxury when you don’t know when your next paycheque is coming.

“We’ve lost people with years of experience who have worked hard to make some of the games nominated tonight, but more importantly, we’ve watched our friends get laid off, we’ve seen how that impacts their families, their children.”

Pearce even found room for a joke at The Game Awards’ expense, displaying a ‘Please Wrap it Up’ message on screen as her speech continued, alluding to the much-criticised hurrying off of award winners from Geoff Keighley’s show last year.

Further criticism of the industry’s layoffs came from Independent Game Festival chairperson Shawn Pierre, who introduced the awards evening.

“It’s been so difficult to see our peers not treated with the respect they deserve,” Pierre said. “We’ve already seen thousands of people losing work this year because they’re not being valued the way they should be. People are working overtime and on weekends only to be left behind when a game is completed. It’s unhealthy, it’s certainly not sustainable, and the end result of this is a weaker game industry for all of us.”

Pierre went on to condemn the current wave of harassment targeting specific developers who, he said, were being made to feel their work was “harmful to games”.

“Between the countless announcements of layoffs, we’re also reading too many stories of how people are being systematically pushed out of the game industry rather than being empowered or recognised for their contributions,” Pierre said. “They’re being made to feel like they don’t belong, that the work they are doing is not significant, and instead harmful to games. This is beyond unacceptable, and change is well overdue.”

Earlier this week, the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) published a statement expressing “deep concern” over the “increased harassment of historically marginalised developers and those advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives”.

“These concerns stem from similar harassment campaigns experienced during the GamerGate period in the mid-2010s,” the non-profit IGDA wrote. “Harassment has no place in games or the games industry, and we must create a safe, welcoming, and equitable environment for everyone.”

Thousands of games industry staff have lost their jobs over the past 18 months at video game developers and publishers big and small – and it is an inescapable topic at the moment across the games industry. As for the financial triggers, we recently took a look at what is going on with layoffs in the video games industry for the business reasons behind the job losses.