The 2023 Game Awards was full of new trailers and announcements but light on actual awards. Host Geoff Keighley ended up speedrunning through many of them, ultimately denying the winners an acceptance speech or cutting them off before they could finish one. Fortunately, some of the devs behind the best games of the year have found a way to share their complete acceptance speech anyway, including Baldur’s Gate 3 director Swen Vincke.
Baldur's Gate 3's Karlach Actor On Playing The Beloved Barbarian
Share SubtitlesOffEnglishShare this VideoFacebookTwitterEmailRedditLinkview videoBaldur’s Gate 3’s Karlach Actor On Playing The Beloved Barbarian
The armor-wearing boss of Larian Studios was effectively told to “wrap it up” at the end of this year’s ceremony even as he tried to dedicate Baldur’s Gate 3’s Game of the Year award to development team members who had since passed away. So Vincke recently took to Twitter to share everything he didn’t get to say on stage that night while celebrating the creative achievement of the Dungeons & Dragons-based story-driven RPG.
“What I wanted to say at the Game Awards,” he wrote. “Winning Game of the year is a great honor and I want to first thank everyone that voted for us and I want to congratulate all the other nominees. This has been an incredibly competitive year and you each would have deserved to win this award Capcom, Remedy Entertainment, Insomniac Games, and Nintendo.”
The thread continued:
The shout out to the Dungeons & Dragons team was especially notable. Parent company Hasbro just laid off 1,100 people, including longtime members on teams across Wizards of the Coast working on D&D and Magic: The Gathering. Fans have been trying to square their recent success, exemplified by licensed projects like Baldur’s Gate 3, with so many staff members getting laid off right before the holidays.
Larian Studios wasn’t the only one who got a chance to share acceptance speech remarks that The Game Awards didn’t seem to have time for. IGN reached out to several of the winners who didn’t get to speak to share their remarks in full. They included Sea of Stars maker Sabotage Studios (Best Indie Game), Tchia maker Awaceb (Games for Impact), the team behind Street Fighter 6 (Best Fighting Game), and the team behind Resident Evil Village (Best VR/AR game). You can read those acceptance speeches here.
