Over the past few months, Baldur’s Gate 3’s developers have used its platform during awards season speeches to advocate for a healthier game industry. This tradition now extends to its publishing director, who, in a recent interview with Game File, shared his thoughts on industry-wide layoffs plaguing developers over the past two years as an “avoidable fuck up.”
Chief among 2024’s massive layoffs include Nintendo announcing its restructuring in March which has the potential to affect over 100 contract workers; Sony laying off roughly 900 employees in February — including developers across studios like Insomniac, Naughty Dog, and Guerrilla, and Microsoft laying off 1,900 staff from its workforce in January following its $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard.
The complex and avoidable nature of layoffs
Speaking with Game File’s Steven Totilo, Michael Douse likened major gaming companies to massive oil tankers predicated on their ability to steer toward sucess. Should a company fail to plan accordingly, while giving developers proper financial reserves to pivot, fallout via layoffs is sure to come. Instead of feeling like layoffs are an inevitable aspect of the gaming industry, Douse argues that they are avoidable.
“But to prevent these giant operational failures that we call layoffs…they are an avoidable f*ck up. That’s really all they are,” Douse told Game File. “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.’”
Douse went on to note that none of the company’s issuing layoffs are at risk of going bankrupt, but are instead at risk of “pissing off the shareholders.” This shareholder-motivated business mindset was something Larian CEO Swen Vincke called out during his acceptance speech for Baldur’s Gate 3’s Best Narrative award. Douse echoed Vincke’s sentiments, saying companies should instead curb their greed and plan better so that developers have enough financial reserves available to pivot should they need to steer a game in a different direction.
“[Layoffs] a very, very complex and nuanced decision, Douse said. “But the idea that it’s an inevitability that has to happen, It’s just not true.”
Douse credited much of Baldur’s Gate 3’s achievements, namely maintaining a healthy work environment for its employees to Larian Studios being a privately owned company unbeholden to shareholders. When asked whether Larian Studios would ever go public, Douse said it might give them 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,” Douse said. “If you asked us what Baldur’s Gate III would look like, how much it would cost and how it would feel three years ago, I wouldn’t know. We just took it day by day. As an operation, we created reserves. We scoped up based on what we thought we would need and created reserves and fallbacks, just in case we would have to. Luckily, we don’t have to. We’re just nimble. Being nimble is key. Big companies are not nimble.”
Passive marketing vs socially resonate communication
While Douse doesn’t ascribe to the notion that the video games industry is on the verge of collapse, he does think its traditional methods of marketing on social media websites like Twitter/X are becoming less important.
“I mean, for Baldur’s Gate III we didn’t really do a lot of marketing. People talk about the bear scene as a big marketing beat. It wasn’t. It was a communication: Something we decided to do to showcase one extreme of romance in the game, as opposed to the Karlach scene in the restaurant.”
Douse went on to argue that marketing, while a form of communication, doesn’t generate the social resonance online that people want to engage in meaningful conversations over.
“A game’s success is defined by how socially resonant it is,” Douse said. “It’s not defined by a person who decided this game was successful. Which is a brilliant thing.”
Toward the latter half of the interview, Douse drew parallel to Baldur’s Gate 3’s critical and commercial sucess, despite being a a “fucking CPRG” investors would have otherwise never taken a chance on, to the meteoric success of Palworld — who reached 19 million total players less than two weeks after launch.
“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 fucking simple. It’s not rocket science,” Douse said. “The analysts are confused, because they didn’t see it coming. And they want basic data sets and predictability. They’re gonna be confused a lot in the future. Me, too. I like being confused. We work best in chaos.”
Isaiah Colbert is a freelance writer for IGN. You can follow them on Twitter @ShinEyeZehUhh
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