Line up in the dark in front of the glowing screen: gaming for all you’re worth.
Photo: dpa
The global market for video games is expected to generate sales of around 230 billion euros this year. According to confident forecasts, the market volume can increase to 350 billion euros within the next five years, which means that the industry is far behind all other industries in the entertainment segment. However, this projected growth in the near future could not contain the wave of layoffs that has occurred this year. On the contrary: According to the trade magazine “Golem”, more than 9,000 employees in the industry will have lost their jobs in 2023 alone.
However, this sad topic had no place at the gaming industry’s annual product presentation show at the beginning of December with the simple title “The Game Awards”, which was held a week ago in Los Angeles. However, it was observed that the current market capitalization phase of many large and smaller development studios has left its mark on the Game Awards. Instead of giving this year’s award winners the space they needed in the show, countless new announcements were thrown out. The paid advertisements sometimes outshone the awards ceremony, or at least far more time was devoted to them than many viewers would have liked.
Most winners only had a few minutes to give their acceptance speeches. Hideo Kojima, a legendary game developer and friend of host Geoff Keighley, took almost ten minutes to introduce his latest project under the name “OD”. It’s no wonder that the industry won’t allow its own show to be stolen, given the enormous sums it’s willing to pay to display its announcement trailers. But the bosses of the biggest top dogs still had to accept a small defeat: With “Baldur’s Gate 3,” a game won the “Game of the Year” award that not even the biggest experts among the nerds had expected.
Like in a computer game: the likeable underdog managed to successfully defeat the nasty villain in the last level. With the role-playing game “Baldur’s Gate 3” from the Belgian development studio Larian, a niche game was able to secure this year’s title. The freedom of choice that players enjoy over the course of the story made »Baldur’s Gate 3« a benchmark in its genre and was hailed as a literary masterpiece.
“Baldur’s Gate” received the highest rating of all time from the specialist magazine “Gamestar” with 95 points. The game feels “like a tabletop role-playing game evening with good friends, complete with a bit of chaos and crazy ideas,” explains the editor-in-chief of “Gamestar” Heiko Klinge in an interview with “Spiegel”. Every side task, no matter how small, is “staged just as elaborately as the main story.” This makes the world feel “more alive and more believable than we were used to from role-playing games of this type.”
When actor Neil Newborn took the stage to accept the award for best performance for his portrayal of the high elf villain Astarion in “Baldur’s Gate 3,” millions of tears of joy flowed from fans worldwide. Newborn himself previously reported that he almost quit acting in 2008 until he discovered work as a voice actor and motion capture actor for video games. So the games industry probably creates jobs for some people!
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