Baldur’s Gate 3
Everyone, from viewers to developers, are not terribly amused that The Game Awards spent way too much time on trailers, muppets and Hideo Kojima, rather than allowing more than 30-45 seconds for award winner victory speeches. Calculations indicate that only about 10 minutes of the show was acceptance speeches, in about a three hour production.
Well, there’s now an interesting thread from Swen Vincke, founder and CEO of Larian, which won GOTY, among many other awards, for 2023 breakout hit Baldur’s Gate 3. Despite being at the end of the show with no real urgency to keep it short, the speech was indeed quite short, still subject to the 30-45 second time limit. Now, Vincke took to Twitter to post what would have been the full text of his speech. You can read the thread here, or you can see how it looks all at once below:
“Winning Game of the year is a great honor and I want to first thank everyone that voted for us and I want to congratulate all the other nominees. This has been an incredibly competitive year and you (Capcom, Remedy, Insomniac, Nintendo) each would have deserved to win this award.
“I want to thank Geoff Keighely and the people that organized The Game Awards for creating an award show so big that it gets mainstream attention. While 30 secs is a bit short, there’s nothing like the Game Awards and it’s an incredible achievement.
“I wore armor at the The Game Awards because BG3 is a game that couldn’t exist without its our player community and I wanted to pay tribute to how important they’ve been for the development. You rock community BG3. Making a game like this only works if you have an incredible, passionate and talented team and in that regard I am incredibly lucky with Larian – they are some of the finest and they did a truly amazing job.
Baldur’s Gate 3 GOTY winners
“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.
“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.
“You don’t get to make something like BG3 if you don’t have the support from the people around you. Personally, I really want to thank 5 special people, a crazy dog and a one-eyed cat for sticking with me.”
“Big shout out also to our localization partners and Pit Stop Productions who had to use every corner of their building to record and performance capture what was an insane number of lines. To our actors – you did great. I hope our paths will cross again in the future and your agents will remain their usual reasonable selves. I also want to thank Wizards of the Coast and specifically the DnD team for giving us carte blanche. I’m really sorry to hear so many of you were let go. It’s a sad thing to realize that of the people who were in the original meeting room, there’s almost nobody left. I hope you all end up well.
“There are many more partners I want to thank. We asked much of you all, but you delivered and without your efforts, BG3 would not be what it is. 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. 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. Thank you.
“Also, Baldur’s Gate 3 is now out on Xbox.”
So, I just went through, read this aloud, and timed it. It was two minutes and thirty seconds. Maybe pushed to 3 minutes with some pauses or slower recitation. Would it have killed the show to allow two extra minutes for the CEO of the developer of one of the highest rated games in years and the show’s GOTY winner to get his full speech out, which includes tributes to people close to him who passed way. No, no it wouldn’t have. Do better next time.
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