Awarded Game of the Year at the 2024 DICE Awards, Baldur’s Gate 3 is one of the biggest hits of 2023. When accepting the award, Larian spoke about the state of the video game industry, criticizing the recent mass layoffs and offering full support to developers who found themselves out of work overnight.
Between 2023 and 2024, over 15,000 workers were laid off, more than 5,000 in January 2024 alone, a truly unfortunate month from this point of view. In addition to Microsoft, giants such as Embracer Group and many others have laid off hundreds of employees, with a single goal: making ends meet and reducing expenses to survive a 2024 that promises to be horrible for the video game industry.
Larian publishing director Michael Douse highlights how the studio is very lucky to be experiencing a positive period but unfortunately this is not the case for everyone and the fault almost never lies with the members of a development team but rather with the management, and all too often it is the individual developers who pay the price.
Larian “has no shareholders and therefore we don’t have to think about pleasing these people. We have to be accountable to the community and we do it by creating fun games, this will make us money, the end of it.”
In reality, PCGamer points out how Larian can count on the support of external holdings including Tencent, a Chinese giant which owns 30% ownership of the studio behind Baldur’s Gate. However, Tencent has no power in corporate decisions. Meanwhile, it seems that Larian wants to open two new studios in Poland, although at the moment there is no confirmation on this yet.