Baldur's Gate 3 winning Game Of The Year during The Game Awards 2023 (TGA 2023) was honestly very much expected. After all, Larian Studios, the game development company behind it, poured their hearts and souls into the game. As such, when only given a short amount of time on stage for his acceptance speech, Larian Studios CEO Swen Vincke was not able to say everything he wanted to say. Thankfully, we won't have to speculate what his speech could have been, as Swen Vincke himself posted what he wanted to say during TGA 2023.

On his X (formerly Twitter) account, Vincke uploaded a sixteen-post-long thread about “what [he] wanted to say at the #gameawards”. The posts contained everything that he wanted to say that he wouldn't have been able to say given the one minute he was given during TGA 2023.

He started his thread by saying that “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”. Vincke then proceeded to tag Capcom, Remedy Games, Insomniac Games, and Nintendo, the companies behind Resident Evil 4, Alan Wake 2, Marvel's Spider-Man 2, Super Mario Bros. Wonder, and Tears of the Kingdom respectively. These games were the ones that Baldur's Gate 3 won against.

The thread then continued (account tags and hashtags rewritten for readability):

I want to thank Geoff Keighley and the people that organized the Game Awardsfor creating an award show so big that it gets mainstream attention. While 30 secs is a bit short , there’s nothing like the game awards and it’s an incredible achievement.

I wore armor at the Game Awards because BG3 is a game that couldn’t exist without its our player community and I wanted to pay tribute to how important they’ve been for the development. You rock community BG3.

Making a game like this only works if you have an incredible passionate and talented team and in that regard I am incredibly lucky with the Larian Studios – they are some of the finest and they did a truly amazing job.

Over 2000 people are listed in the credits and since I can’t call out everyone, I want to focus on a group of people that don’t always get the credit they deserve.

Team QA, team localisation, team customer support, team operations, team publishing, team play testers, and every other developer at Larian, BG3 wouldn’t exist without you and you all deserve to be very proud of this.

I want to dedicate this award to the friends and family members we lost during development including Jim, our lead cinematic animator who passed away last month and personally to my father who passed away the week before we launched our early access campaign.

You don’t get to make something like BG3 if you don’t have the support from the people around you. Personally, I really want to thank 5 special people, a crazy dog and a one-eyed cat for sticking with me.

Big shout out also to our localization partners and Pit Stop Tweets who had to use every corner of their building to record and performance capture what was an insane number of lines.

To our actors – you did great. I hope our paths will cross again in the future and your agents will remain their usual reasonable selves 🙂

I also want to thank Wizards of the Coast and specifically the DnD team for giving us carte blanche. I’m really sorry to hear so many of you were let go. It’s a sad thing to realize that of the people who were in the original meeting room, there’s almost nobody left. I hope you all end up well.

There are many more partners I want to thank. We asked much of you all, but you delivered and without your efforts, BG3 would not be what it is.

I want to end with a story of a conversation I had a long time ago with a publisher. He told me, luckily for them, games are driven by idealism. He meant it in an exploitative way but he was right.

Games are a unique art form, as important as books, music or movies. Many developers, myself included, make games because they love seeing others engage with their creations in a way only games can offer

They don’t care that much about the money made beyond it being the fuel they need to create new and better games. It’s worth reminding everyone that fuel is but a means, not a goal. Whereto and how we journey are what matter and what we remember.

Thank you.

He then ended his sixteen-post-thread with a seventeenth post simply stating “Also – BG3 is now out on Xbox.” This last bit was one of the surprises that Larian Studios did during The Game Awards, as they just released Baldur's Gate 3 out of nowhere after the rewards show was done.

Svincke's almost 550 wor or so speech would have taken around 4 minutes or so to read out (according to Words to Time). That would have been way above the one minute or so that the Larian Studios CEO (and the other winners of TGA 2023) were given. Although Swen Vincke was able to thank quite a few people in his acceptance speech, the one he posted on X may just be his “true” TGA 2023 acceptance speech, so to speak.

That's all we have for Larian Studios CEO Swen Vincke's “full acceptance speech” for TGA 2023. Check out our gaming news articles for the latest in gaming news.