The Game Awards 2024 came and went, and as someone who enjoys, consumes, and writes about video games, I felt compelled to tune in – in part to see what games would be announced, and also to roll my eyes at all the silly things (some intentional, others not so much) that generally happen at shows like this. I realize I’m getting old, so maybe I’m being a bit of a curmudgeon here, but I often feel like I’m no longer the target audience for a lot of this. I still greatly appreciate video games and have an untold amount of respect and admiration for the talented developers that bring them to fruition – it’s just that... I’m here for the games and the people making them, not Snoop Dogg or the Muppets, if you know what I mean.
But even if we look at games alone, there’s still much to consider. A fourth Witcher game is being made – great news, of course, and The Witcher 3 is one of my favorite games of the last decade, but the excitement regarding its announcement is marred by memories of Cyberpunk 2077’s broken promises and generally disastrous launch. There’s more Elden Ring being made. There’s more Onimusha being made. There’s more Borderlands being made. There’s more The Outer Worlds being made. I could go on. Occasionally, you do notice some things that make you raise an eyebrow in a good way – Josef “F the Oscars” Fares’ (of A Way Out fame) is working on Split Fiction, a new project that looks like it’s filled with creativity and exciting ideas. It looks like a game made for the sake of making a fun game people would want to play – “no loot boxes, no microtransactions, and no BS,” the man himself states in the trailer. Which brings me to my next point, namely Swen Vincke’s speech. It’s a speech that you may have missed if you didn’t watch the whole show, or simply focused on all the new trailers and announcements we got, but its message is more than worth repeating, even if it largely contains things we all know, but perhaps don’t say out loud often enough.
The Larian CEO’s brief appearance on stage was spent very productively – when he wasn’t subtly poking fun at the fact that he was given the “please wrap it up” treatment when accepting his 2023 award for the immensely successful Baldur’s Gate 3, Vincke made some serious, hard-hitting statements about the industry as a whole.
What’s the formula to making a successful game, one that will be up on stage in 2025 to claim the title of Game of the Year?
“It's stupidly simple, but somehow it keeps on getting lost,” the Larian CEO began. A successful studio would “make a game that they wanted to play themselves,” he went on. “They didn't make it to increase market share. They didn't make it to serve as a brand.” Another all-too-common practice politely lambasted by Vincke was “cramming the game with anything whose only purpose was to increase revenue and didn't serve the game design.” The people in charge of the studio in Vincke’s example “didn't treat their developers like numbers on a spreadsheet”, nor did they “treat their players as users to exploit.”
“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,” he concluded, before talking about how life-changing of an experience it is to win Game of the Year.
His words essentially called out big-name publishers in the most charismatic and wholesome way imaginable, and you know what? This really is stupidly simple. Common sense, even. Now, I’m not entirely sure if Vincke’s speech is going to suddenly change things, at least not right away, but it needed to be said, and the success of games like Baldur’s Gate 3, a game with no microtransactions and loot boxes, seems to show that the formula can indeed work. Hopefully, 2025’s Game of the Year will live up to these standards.
