All eyes are on the tech industry lately, and especially the gaming space, where layoffs are so widespread that there’s an entire Wikipedia page about it now to help keep track. However, Michael Douse, director of publishing at Larian, the notably-private studio responsible for Baldur’s Gate 3 and Divinity: Original Sin, says that calling it inevitable is “just not true.”
In fact, he just straight-up calls it “an avoidable f**k-up.”
“That's all they really are,” Douse said in an interview [Note: The original piece has a hard paywall] with games media veteran Stephen Totilo, formerly of Axios and now independently publishing news and coverage. “That's why you see one after the other. Because companies are going: 'Well, finally. Now we can, too. We've wanted to do it for ages. Everyone else is. So why don't we?' That's really kind of sick."
More directly, he calls out the corporate structure of public game studios as detrimental to the workplace, the very games they’re making, and players they’re selling to. After all, as he frames it, "None of these companies are at risk of going bankrupt. They're just at risk of pissing off the shareholders.”
As a counterpoint to the trend of studios being beholden to stockholders as public companies, he discusses that as a privately-owned studio, Larian has a better work environment, allowing the studio to work at its own pace instead of being held to often unrealistic standards.
The money that comes from becoming a public company, or even owned by one, is a perk, but the creative and labor cost is too risky: “Creating the games that we wanted to make, going public might give us more money, but it would be antithetical to the quality part of what we're trying to do. So it wouldn't make our games better. It would just make us rushed.”
Another perk of being private? Making games that gamers actually want to play. He even compares that sort of success of Baldur’s Gate 3 to a game like Palworld, in that sense. “They took a bunch of mechanics they knew people liked, made a game that was unbothered by what a game should be, and they gave it directly to players who decided to buy it. That's really f**king simple. It’s not rocket science.”
Many of these points about industry greed were mirrored by CEO Swen Vincke during and just after The Game Awards.
The full interview is available via subscription on Stephen Totilo’s independent Game File newsletter.
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