"The oracle told me that the Game of the Year 2025 is going to be made by a studio who found the formula to make it up here on stage," Vincke said. "It's stupidly simple, but somehow it keeps on getting lost. A studio makes a game because they want to make a game they want to play themselves. They created it because it hadn't been created before. They didn't make it to increase market share. They didn't make it to serve the brand. They didn't have to meet arbitrary sales targets, or fear being laid off if they didn't meet those targets.
"Furthermore, the people in charge forbade them from cramming the game with anything whose only purpose was to increase revenue and didn't serve the game design. They didn't treat their developers like numbers on a spreadsheet. They didn't treat their players as users to exploit. And they didn't make decisions they knew were short-sighted in function of a bonus or policy. They knew that if you put the game and the team first, the revenue will follow. They were driven by idealism, and wanted players to have fun, and they realized that if the developers don't have fun, nobody was going to have any fun. They understood the value of respect, that if they treated their developers and players well, the same developers and players would forgive them when things didn't go as planned. But above all they cared about their games, because they love games. It's really that simple."
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