> This is a gigantic effort from Larian, who among all things is still updating its software instead of resting on its own laurels.
What makes this story even better is how it actually came about - this wasn't initially a top-down corporate initiative, but rather a passion project from a single engineer who worked on it after hours. The fact that Larian immediately recognized the value and threw their full support behind it says everything about their culture.
Swen Vincke shared the backstory:
> The story of how this came to be really is one of true passion. The Steam Deck native build was initiated by a single engineer who really wanted a smoother version of the game on Steam Deck and so he started working on it after hours. When we tried it out, we were all surprised by how good it felt and so it didn't take much to convince us to put our shoulders behind it and get it released. It's this type of pure passion for their craft that makes me fall in love with my developers over and over again. Considering myself very lucky to have people like him on my team. Try it out!
They probably would have to get the permission of the engineer to name them publicly. With how the gaming community behaves on social media I wouldn't be surprised if the engineer doesn't want that. Because that could mean death threats for you and your family the next time a subset of the community gets upset with your employer.
Not sure why this is getting downvoted, you are absolutely correct. The unhinged weirdos are still a minority, but less and less ashamed of their own behavior online. No doubt that dev is better off remaining unnamed in this instance.
They may be a minority but they are more empowered than ever. Both by the new owner of Twitter and the current politics in the US.
It’s a shame that large companies like EA/Bethesda/Valve/etc don’t do more to fight against it, instead of cowering and leaving indie devs that are barely surviving to fend this off.
> all of mid/late 2010s online politics was colored by one reviewer giving a favourable game review to a game that some people disliked
That's kind of a twisted interpretation of events. It was coloured by one incel who though he owned the developer of a game and a whole lot of incels who sympathized because they too were owed a vagina by the ones who controlled them. Now it's spread to broader issues and higher levels of politics and is still going.
I remember the start of GamerGate well, it was all people screaming about "ethics in games journalism". But you're obviously right that that it wasn't really about ethics in games journalism, your description is probably a better reflection of the actual psychology of the people involved.
And then there are people, gamers, who were actually just dismayed with the conflicts of interest that ran rampant in the orthodox "games journalism" space and didn't give two shits about the personal drama side of the story, although that's mostly solved by finding your favorite youtube reviewer. And those who were genuinely focused on improving discovery of good indie games were subjected to some pretty horrible commentary that completely missed the point. Now there are smaller dedicated publications or channels that actually do regularly (weekly/monthly) review a decent volume of new promising indie games to help discover standouts, but that turned out to be a niche that the existing publications didn't want to keep up with, and a niche that suddenly many people denied even existed, for some reason? People who can't contemplate that there are amazing passion projects out there to be discovered, I suppose because those people can't imagine actually working hard on something people would enjoy, because they would rather spend their time raining on others' parades instead.
But it was too close of a tangent towards criticism of establishment journalism in general, so of course establishment journalism countered back with the only weapon it has, and suddenly the vast majority of people forgot any of it had to do with reviewing and promoting good indie video games.
People who make indie games are not losers. People who want good games to be promoted are not losers. It is an art. It's not for everyone. People who just want to play the latest AAA sequel can stick to those. But if you've ever tried a niche indie game and been more impressed than you expected, you know it's art, and you'd want other people discovering and promoting the good ones, and talking about what makes them special.
I am not going to re-litigate GamerGate here. There were people who were genuinely concerned about ethics in games journalism, sure. But it did not become the defining event in the online-political sphere of the mid/late '10s simply due to genuine concerns about ethics in games journalism.
Correct, because a large portion of the public has no idea what indie games are, or how the software industry works, but they know that angry nerds are funny.
What I remember is that there were a subset of people I was acquainted with online who when this started all /immediately/ started posting things exactly like the comment this is a reply to; "these people just don't respect women, you all need to sit down and listen to women and center women" kinds of things. They were all men; mostly straight men although some were bi, and all generally thought to be fine although known for being a little performative and mildly, as they say, horny on main a little too often.
Every single one of them later turned out to be a sexual predator. This is now known as the "softboi" or "male feminist". This kind of person is still out there and is dangerous as ever, so it's important to keep an eye out.
(None of these people were in tech; instead all my tech coworkers who were men and lived in SF also heard "we need to respect women", but being kind of autistic engineers took it too literally and didn't seem to know any women, so they seemed to think the right thing to do was go out and find a woman and literally just start respecting them. This didn't work out for them and they mostly ended up getting scammed by scammers who happened to be women.)
No you are the one twisting it. It was about conflict of interest regardless how hard you try to throw around ad-hominems and rewrite history.
A game reviewer should not be in sexual relationships with people selling games that get reviewed. I think anybody not ideologically captured would agree.
I also find it tasteless to use the same rhetoric here as it was used back then to slander someone into suicide.
Not that I'm aware of. I thought that was weird at first as well, but I assume it might be in a way to protect the engineer.
Unfortunately, singling out any individual developer, even for praise, can attract unwanted negative attention online. By acknowledging the passion and the work without naming the person, Swen gives them full credit internally while shielding them from becoming a public target.
This doesn't even necessarily have to be intentional harassment, but if this engineer is now the "SteamDeck guy" at Larian, their social media might get flooded by people who mistake their personal social media accounts for a support ticket.
I'm sure the engineer has the option to self-identify if they wish, but this approach feels like a sign of good and thoughtful leadership.
This is an interesting perspective... I'd be at a loss to think of an example of an engineer who's been publicly pilloried (having been highly regarded for great work) for the failings of their company. Perhaps you could cite and example?
Seems enormously more likely to be the all to familiar story in the games industry of not providing credit to individual devs. Something that goes back to the earliest days of Atari.
> I'd be at a loss to think of an example of an engineer who's been publicly pilloried (having been highly regarded for great work) for the failings of their company. Perhaps you could cite and example?
Because these guys and gals are not famous enough to warrant large coverage, and because the phenomenon is unfortunately so widespread that noone is going to cover every case.
Thanks, really appreciate the concrete examples. They're not quite what I was referring to (developer praised by company / media - then attacked for issues with the company beyond their purview), but they do point to a (largely invisible from outside the industry / twitter bubble) truly worrying and frightening level of animosity and aggression pointed towards devs that I wasn't sufficiently aware of.
I don't think you need a case quite this specific because of the following:
> then attacked for issues with the company beyond their purview
Ultimately, whether an employee is praised or not is completely irrelevant to the nutjobs taking their anger out on them because of something their employer did.
I agree. It's bad in either case. No issue with a game or game engine should ever result in threats of violence or harassment. It's vile to publicly shame, cancel, still less attack individuals for the mistakes of their companies.
My initial skepticism was based in the voluminous amount of false allegations of harassment and misportrayal of valid criticism as harassment that happened at one point several years ago in the games industry.
I'm not necessarily saying they'd get pilloried. I'm saying that having your personal digital space colonized by people who think you're customer support is insanely disruptive.
Think replies full of "I only get 8 fps in Act 3, pls fix" when you just wanted to post a photo of your vacation.
I can't think of specific names anymore since it's been a while since I have played it, but a lot of the developers for World of Warcraft used to be and likely still are active on Twitter. For a lot of them, the community knew fairly well which features of the game or which class they were responsible for. When I used to look at the replies to some of their Tweets (even ones completely unrelated to WoW), they were often full of complaints about their area of perceived responsibility.
I fully understand every engineer who just wants to put their head down and work on their stuff they're passionate about without having to also be public-facing. Even in a small company like mine, some of our devs constantly complain that some customers know that they are responsible for certain features of our product and email them directly rather than going through the proper support channels.
Your point about the games industry often struggling with providing proper credit to devs is well taken - it's absolutely an issue. But in this case, Vincke did actually do that, in a way. He could've just kept quiet and let the playerbase think it was a company effort, but instead he publicly highlighted and recognized the passion and work of one of their engineers (even though anonymously). That engineer can look at the countless positive replies to that post and get the nice fuzzy feeling without getting dragged into the spotlight.
I take your point about being inadvertently made a point of contact for customer support / complaints about technical issues with the game.
Disagree however about the value credit - personal credit has concrete value (career wise, status wise etc), warm and fuzzy feelings less so. Right now we can only guess whether the dev had a say in the matter.
You're absolutely right that named credit has tangible career benefits that go well beyond feelings. But I think Vincke threaded that needle well with the anonymous public credit - it creates a documented public record of innovative work at the company level while preserving the engineer's privacy.
The engineer can still leverage this (LinkedIn, internal promotions, industry networking) without being forced into a public-facing role they might not want. When they're interviewing or networking, they can point to Vincke's public acknowledgment and say "that was my project" in contexts where it's professionally relevant, without having their personal social media permanently associated with it.
Considering Vincke was impressed enough to publicly acknowledge this individual's passion and initiative, there's no doubt in my mind that this engineer could get named credit or something that would acknowledge their role in the project if they wanted it.
But to go a bit meta:
I think it's strange that we are discussing this in the context of a CEO publicly acknowledging one of their engineers (even if anonymously). Vincke is, at least in the context of the broader industry, going above and beyond. I doubt you'd see Ubisoft, EA, or Blizzard publicly acknowledging a single engineer's after-hours passion project in this way.
Feels a bit like misdirected energy, I guess?
Why are we debating about the nuances of named vs anonymous credit and recognition when industry leaders don't give any?
It's like calling someone out for only tipping 10% while ignoring the guy in the top hat who's tipping 0. If you want gaming companies to get better about giving credit and recognition, you should support the companies that are at least moving in the right direction. I know it's easy to be cynical, but don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
I'd cite that as an example of the tyranny of diminished expectations. To be clear - I was criticising not providing named recognition. Of course providing some recognition is better than none. Perhaps you're right, perhaps the engineer involved can leverage this in interviews (or perhaps not, it might be difficult to prove / DNA'd etc), but you're giving the CEO the benefit of the doubt here.
I very strongly agree all creative workers should receive fair recognition (and compensation) for their work. I disagree with directionality as a moral framework. Doing something similar to the right thing is not necessarily doing the right thing. In this case my immediate assumption would be that the CEO is boasting about their anonymous hardworking impassioned employees as a way of 'glazing' the company, rather than shielding them from public criticism. It's impossible to know, but CEOs are not generally known to be good and ethical people. Larian may well be exceptional in this regard, but giving the benefit of the doubt to CEOs in general is a poor heuristic.
I've worked enough with customers to know they're mostly fine, until you get that one weirdo that finds out where you work and follows you home. You get a few every year. Knowing that, who would want their name associated with something in a space that produces as many incredibly motivated folks as the videogame industry?
What makes this story even better is how it actually came about - this wasn't initially a top-down corporate initiative, but rather a passion project from a single engineer who worked on it after hours. The fact that Larian immediately recognized the value and threw their full support behind it says everything about their culture.
Swen Vincke shared the backstory:
> The story of how this came to be really is one of true passion. The Steam Deck native build was initiated by a single engineer who really wanted a smoother version of the game on Steam Deck and so he started working on it after hours. When we tried it out, we were all surprised by how good it felt and so it didn't take much to convince us to put our shoulders behind it and get it released. It's this type of pure passion for their craft that makes me fall in love with my developers over and over again. Considering myself very lucky to have people like him on my team. Try it out!
https://x.com/LarAtLarian/status/1970526548592623969
That combination of individual passion and company willingness to back good ideas is what makes Larian special.