Baldur's Gate 3 publisher believes developers should become “pirates” to clean up BioWare and other studios

The practice of mass layoffs in the gaming industry does not sit well with the publisher of Baldur's Gate 3.

News recently broke about layoffs at BioWare, the developer of Dragon Age The Veilguard. This fueled discussions about what is happening in the gaming industry.

Larian Studios Director of Publishing Michael Douse continues to speak out on social media. This time, he decided to touch upon the topic of layoffs in the industry — in his opinion, employees should be valued, and decision-makers, rather than rank-and-file workers, should bear responsibility:

“You do not have to lay off the majority of the dev team between projects or after they wrap up. Retaining that institutional knowledge is crucial — it is key for subsequent projects. 

[Such layoffs] are often justified as ‘trimming the fat’ [cutting redundant staff], and to some extent I understand it under financial pressure, but does not that highlight just how unnecessary the aggressive efficiency of giant corporations is? I would get it if they were putting out hit after hit — maybe you could argue it works, but clearly aggressive rationalization (layoffs) is not that.

This is nothing more than cost-cutting in the harshest sense. It is always the people lower down the food chain who suffer, while the problem is clearly in the strategy [crafted by] those higher up the chain. On a pirate ship, the captain would be thrown overboard. Video game companies should be run like pirate ships.”

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Cover art author: Larian Studios. Image source: steamcommunity.com