On December 12th, 2024, The Game Awards had its annual awards show, and the award for Game of the Year was presented by Larian Studios head Swen Vincke. Vincke, coming a year after his own studio made the award-winning Baldur’s Gate 3, prefaced the award by giving a short speech in which he claimed to know who the next winner of the Game of the Year award would be. In that speech he extolled the virtues of the gaming industry and claimed that the next game of the year was shown to him by an oracle, and here I will quote his own introduction:
“The oracle told me that the game of the year 2025 was going to be made by a studio who found the formula to make it up here. It’s stupidly simple, but somehow it keeps on getting lost. The studio made their game because they wanted to make a game that they wanted to play themselves.”
This speech got shared a lot by people who love video games afterwards because… well, why wouldn’t they? The whole speech is a love letter to the game industry and to all of the things that we want to be true. You can look it up if you’d like to, but it contains the points that you’d like, wherein the developers just made a game they wanted to make that was a work of passion instead of profit and cared about making the best game possible. It was a nice speech.
It’s also complete bunk.
Now, my point here is not to drag Swen Vincke personally; by all accounts he’s a fine person, and I don’t blame him for wanting to have a moment extolling the virtues of making games for the love of games and critiquing business-focused decisions that hurt the industry. The problem here is not the sentiment but the fact of treating it as if these truths are self-evident. And I feel relatively confident that Vincke knows this because despite his speech talking about how the next winner wouldn’t be making a game to serve a brand, you know who he is because he made a game to serve a brand.
Even if you pretend to not know that Dungeons & Dragons is a brand, you know that Baldur’s Gate 3 is serving a brand because there’s a number at the end of the title. It was absolutely a passionate project made by passionate people who really, genuinely wanted to make a sequel to a series of titles they didn’t originate. And it was great! But it was, in fact, in service to a brand.
But you already know this because you can’t watch The Game Awards without being awash in advertisements for Fortnite. I don’t think it’s really a huge debate over whether or not Fortnite is a passion project for its creators, especially since the part of the game that was a passion project was the horde defense game that has been sidelined in favor of the hastily assembled battle royale that makes all the money, hand over fist. Fortnite makes money.
It is, perhaps, the purest visible example of making a game just to match key demographics; it launches spinoff modes and the like whenever there’s a whisper of “maybe we can lump this in and make more money from it.” And it does indeed make scads of money. Ruinous amounts of money. This game is a license to just print money without an ounce of passion beyond “I want to make money.”
Do I think that every single person working on the game is a soulless automaton that cares nothing for video games? No, of course not. I think the game is made by people who like video games and are happy to work in the field, and this is a good way to build the resume and get paid. It’s fine. It’s whatever. But you can’t look at that and say, “The secret to success in this industry is passion, not aiming to increase market share.” It’s just not true.
It would be nice if it were true. It is, in fact, a great aspiration. But it isn’t the reality of anything in the industry.
Do you remember The Wagadu Chronicles? There is so much evidence that the team behind that game were working on exactly the game they wanted to make. They had put together a team that was absolutely committed to their ideal game. Beyond making money, beyond increasing market share, this team was working to make the game they felt strongly about. And then the game hit early access.
People did not like it.
We tend to associate passion and drive as being good things because in the abstract, sure, they are exactly that. But being passionate about the thing you are making does not mean that you are making a thing anyone else will enjoy. Or – even worse – it doesn’t mean that you are making a thing that’s any good. It is possible to be very passionate about a project, but then the actual playable version of the project isn’t fun to play.
Yes, I know you just thought of four or five recent titles I could be talking about here. That’s the point! I don’t doubt the developers were passionate about pretty much any of them. I don’t think you spend time and effort making an MMO of any scale without really loving the idea of what you’re making. But you can really love a thing and really want it to exist and just… do a bad job! Or even do a good job that isn’t profitable. Or profitable “enough.”
So why am I upset about this? If I agree with the sentiment, why am I spending a whole column pointing out that this speech was bad? Well… for a couple of reasons. The first is that it’s important to puncture the fiction of the game industry and the idea that this industry is some kind of perfect meritocracy where you would have been successful if your game were actually good or passionate or whatever. It’s an ideal, but it doesn’t bear any resemblance to reality.
But the second reason is more insidious: It’s because the idea creates the image that there are the Good People making Real Games for Good Reasons and then all of the Bad People. By that line of thinking, the villains of gaming as an industry are the Bad People, and it’s all of those secret villains that don’t deserve to get into the winner’s circle because they just wanted to make money.
That’s why I made a point of using Fortnite as an example, and it’s why it’s not just wrong but destructive to think of “the best game will be the product of genuine passion” as a truism when, not coincidentally, all of the winners of Game of the Year have been massive blockbuster productions. It’s easy to look at your own win as the result of genuine passion, and that’s great, but passionate and earnestly made games of all scales fail all the time.
Heck, Final Fantasy XIV’s original version was made by a team of people who were passionately striving to see a vision realized. And that vision was so hated that the person Square-Enix brought in to save it said he wanted to blow the whole thing up.
There is no secret to making a good video game people enjoy. If there were an easy formula to follow, people who made one good video game would just keep doing that forever. It’s comforting to think that might be the case, sure. I can understand wanting to imagine that if a game failed, it must have been because of the Bad Reasons. But that doesn’t make it the truth, and talking about it as if the right motivations automatically lead to making game of the year does a disservice to a real industry full of real people.
Sometimes you know exactly what’s going on with the MMO genre, and sometimes all you have are Vague Patch Notes informing you that something, somewhere, has probably been changed. Senior Reporter Eliot Lefebvre enjoys analyzing these sorts of notes and also vague elements of the genre as a whole. The potency of this analysis may be adjusted under certain circumstances.
