Baldur’s Gate 3 director shares full Game Awards speech, and it’s moving

You might remember Larian CEO and Baldur’s Gate 3 director Swen Vincke giving a short speech while accepting the Game of the Year Award for BG3. Now he’s taken a second pass online, and delivered a moving statement on behalf of everyone behind the game.

This year at The Game Awards speeches were pretty time-crunched, and when Vincke initially spoke after Baldur’s Gate 3 won Game of the Yeah, he was staring at a massive, blinking countdown. Standing in a suit of armor, he still managed to deliver some important “thank you”s , but if the speech felt rushed, it was. In a lengthy thread, Vincke expanded on some of his main points from The Game Awards and touched on some of the major issues affecting the industry right now.

The new speech begins with a light acknowledgement of what went wrong with the original version. “While 30 seconds is a bit short,” Vincke wrote, “there’s nothing like the game awards and it’s an incredible achievement.” 

Vincke went on to say that the armor he wore the ceremony was he way of celebrating how much the Baldur’s Gate 3 community has supported the game and Larian itself. He pointed out that over 2,000 people helped make the game a reality before giving a special shout out to some typically unsung teams. “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.”

Like he did during his speech at the award ceremony, Vincke dedicated the award to friends and family members who passed away during the game’s development, specifically lead cinematic animator Jim Southworth.

While thanking Wizards of the Coast and the Dungeons & Dragons team for letting Larian chart their own course in that world, Vincke also acknowledged another sad loss: the 1,100 people laid off at Hasbro. “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.”

Vincke ended his speech with a look at the video game industry as a whole. He made a moving recognition that games are art, and the people who develop games do so out of deep passion.

“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.” Hopefully that’s a reminder people hold onto. 

Oh, and almost as an afterthought, Vincke got to actually announce that Baldur’s Gate 3 is on Xbox at the end of this speech.