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When Swen Vincke took the stage at 2024’s Game Awards to call out the entire games industry for being more committed to “market share” and “arbitrary sales targets” than making good games for their own sake, he noted that the secret formula which led to Larian’s meteoric rise had nothing to do with audience expectations or brand value. Instead the team made good, trailblazing games and things just kind of worked out after that.
He’s doubled down in a recent post on X which addresses skeptics of his point directly, as well as anyone saying that games need to start falling in line with multiplayer live service trends, saying it’s “that time of the year again when big single player games are declared dead. Use your imagination. They’re not. They just have to be good.”
It should be no surprise to anyone out and enjoying singleplayer games; it feels like there’s a new firecracker RPG lighting up the Steam charts every few weeks now, with Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 selling a million copies in just 24 hours and Stalker 2 hitting 6 times that a few months in. And though they aren’t exactly singleplayer, co-op blockbusters like Split Fiction and Larian’s own Baldur’s Gate 3 should sufficiently demonstrate the long-standing demand for a robust PvE experience.
But if Vincke’s recent comments are anything to go by, this quip seems squarely aimed at industry-minded types who think in terms of quarterly profit and rapid, endless growth. Larian released a decade’s worth of moderately successful Divinity games before the Original Sin series put them in the limelight—so when at events like the Game Awards, he cautions developers to build their companies slowly with earnest ideas rather than jumping on the latest hype train, he is at least speaking from experience.
It might seem a little on the nose to say games should be good and heartfelt rather than bad and cynical, but Rebellion CEO Jason Kingsley did echo the sentiment in a recent interview with PC Gamer, saying: “We try to make it that we can make a really good game, and it has a very decent chance of making a profit. And that’s really what it comes down to.”
It wasn’t initially clear what exactly begat the statement from Vincke, but he added context a few hours after his initial post, stating: “The why of this tweet is hearing chatter about important industry figures stating there is no future for (big) single player games. Which means discouraging investment in (big) single player games. Which bothers me. Because I don’t think they have it right.”
It’s not certain who these figures are, but Vincke noted that this sort of thinking has effects that saturate the entire industry, leading to fewer chances taken and a safer, blander landscape for games. Vincke noted that proper pushback can prevent such sneering from becoming “a mantra.”
Vincke’s recent celebration of a Stardew Valley modder’s Baldur’s Gate 3 makeover also indicates that he’s just passionate about game developers making things in general. And while it’s an unfortunate fact of life that game production is wrapped up in a vicious industry of left-and-right layoffs and corporate greed, it’s certainly true that singleplayer games are not—and most likely will never be—dead.
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Kurt Indovina
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