Baldur's Gate 3 boss blasts publisher "greed" behind layoffs

eurogamer.net:

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