The managing director of Larian Studios spoke about avoiding Bethesda's “Starfield” and possible further employee growth.
Sven Wincke is CEO of Larian Studios, which released Baldur's Gate 3 last year. With GamesIndustry The 51-year-old now conducted an interview that, among other things, discussed the publication of the RPG masterpiece.
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Avoided the bigger boat
The studio boss makes it clear that he has a lot of respect for Bethesda Softworks. Accordingly, the team wanted to avoid the “Starfield” release.
“I have a lot of respect for Bethesda… When you're out at sea and a bigger boat comes by, the rule is you get out of the way of the bigger boat – they were the bigger boat. “We avoided Bethesda, but we still wanted the world to pay attention to us,” explains Wincke.
With the fantasy role-playing game, the developers wanted to place “a lot of emphasis on identity” and reflect this in the game. He also pointed out that he had published the “much more cinematic game”. This made the gaming experience stand out clearly from the Bethesda titles.
Continue to grow or not?
Elsewhere it was about possible further growth of Larian Studios. Vincke himself has a “strong desire” not to expand the team, but his employees are committed to doing just that.
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So there is a bit of a disagreement in the studio at the moment: “The teams have explained to me in great detail why we need to grow, so there is this fight at the moment. I'm actually the one trying to prevent it. And they have legitimate reasons why they want to grow because they have ambitious goals that they need to achieve, so we try to keep it reasonable.”
Vincke already had a clear opinion regarding growth at the Game Developers Conference. There he criticized the greed of publishers and wanted them to not only pay attention to financial results. Publishing director Michael Douse later described the many mass layoffs as “avoidable crap.”
He also made it clear that he would never develop several games at once. Instead, the studio wants to focus on a maximum of “a few things.” More than that wouldn't be possible in its current form.
“We have the ambition to make really good RPGs, and that’s enough,” says the boss.
If things go well like “Baldur's Gate 3,” then better games can be developed. If things don't go well, then the studio makes fewer games.
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