Baldur's Gate 3 director predicts TGA '25 GOTY winner, and I wholeheartedly agree

Baldur's Gate 3 director Swen Vincke was on the stage at The Game Awards 2024, where he handed out this year's Game of the Year award. Being the recipient of last year's GOTY honor, it was only appropriate that he would be there to pass the torch, one might say, to the next studio that cracked the winning formula for 2024.

But his contribution to The Game Awards 2024 wasn't just being the person who announced the night's biggest moniker to Astro Bot. Before he did so, he remarked that he knew the studio that was going to win the Game of the Year award in TGA 2025.

While I am sure you already have some potential candidates in your head on hearing this, I would suggest holding on to your horses and listening to what the man had to say.

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Swen Vincke, Baldur's Gate 3 director, on who will pick up the Game of the Year award at TGA 2025

Baldur's Gate 3 director at The Game Awards 2024 (Image via TGA)

In a sense, Swen Vincke didn't give a straightforward answer to who will be the winner of next year's GOTY at The Game Awards 2025. Instead, what he explained was much simpler, a winning formula that the studio will have in place.

The information — he humorously claims — was given to him by a modern oracle who made him sign an NDA but he was trusting us, the audience, to keep the secret.

"The Game of the Year 2025 will be made by a studio who has found the formula to make it up here on the stage. It's stupidly simple, but somehow it keeps on getting lost."

One would be quick to say that making a game - its mise en scène - is anything but simple. On the contrary, it requires research, hard work, foresight, and a passion to be creative. While they would be right to think so, Swen Vincke explained why it was "stupidly simple".

"The studio made their game because they wanted to make a game that they wanted to play themselves. They created it because it hadn't been created before. They didn't make it to increase market share. They didn't make it to serve the brand. They didn't have to meet arbitrary sales targets. Or fear they would be laid off if they didn't meet those targets. And furthermore, the people in charge forbade them from cramming the game with anything whose only purpose was to increase revenue and didn't serve the game design."

Pardon the interruption, but the last few lines probably cut deep for both those who make games and those who play them, especially in the past few years. We have seen quite a few broken launches, titles that felt more interested in microtransactions, and games that probably needed just a bit more time and polish.

"They didn't treat their developers like numbers on a spreadsheet [audible applause from the crowd]. They didn't treat their players as users to exploit. And they didn't make decisions that they knew were short-sighted in the function of a bonus or politics. They knew if you put the game and the team first, the revenue would follow. They were driven by idealism and wanted players to have fun. And they realized if the developers didn't have fun, nobody was going to have any fun. 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."

There's no denying that the gaming industry has seen massive layoffs in the past couple of years, similar to other industries around the world. While a lengthy discussion on why that might be is not within the scope of this article (and should probably be done by someone much more qualified than me), we should not turn a blind eye to the same.

Quite a few studios have been hit with accusations of toxic work culture, near-impossible crunch and expectations, and various measures of discrimination. The end products often become games that are merely a shell of what was promised, riddled with hiccups and quickly forgotten by the gamers and the companies themselves.

I realize that many may find Swen Vincke's statement a tad preachy. Others may joke that maybe there were a few people in the audience at The Game Awards 2024 that these words directly/indirectly can end up referring to. But I imagine his statement to be quite true, although idealistic given how the world ends up working.

Helldivers 2 & No Man's Sky (Image via Arrowhead Game Studios || Hello Games)

We do have games like Helldivers 2, Baldur's Gate 3, and No Man's Sky (not talking about its launch but where it is now and how it got there), fuelled by devs who love the game and the community that corrals around the said titles. If you sit down with a bunch of gamers, you will probably find quite a few more such examples.

So, who will win the Game of the Year award at The Game Awards 2025? One can only hope that it will be a studio that lives up to most, if not all, of what Swen Vincke said today.