Fight that post-summer depression and join the companionship of fellow gamedevs at the next FLEGA café! We teamed up with the great peeps at VAF and gameforce to bring you games, fresh beers and sodas. Filling the room with awesomeness is your job 😉
The café is free but you need to register. Once registered, head over to the gameforce entrance desk (Brussels Expo) on September 30th at 6PM, grab your wristband and off you go!
Another edition of gamescom is in the books and while everyone is recovering from all the walking & talking, we’d like to look back at a fantastic week. gamescom 23 drew around 311,000 visitors to Cologne, which means we’re almost back to pre-COVID numbers. Consumers and professionals alike were drawn to the busy halls to discover the latest games and the future of our industry.
All eyes on the BelgianGames booth
On the first day of gamescom 23, a delegation of regional, fedaral and European policy makers visited the crowded halls of the Koelnmesse to witness the sizable impact of the videogame industry with their own eyes. At the Belgian Games booth in the business area, we welcomed Flemish Minister-President and Minister of Culture Jan Jambon to share the 2022 facts and figures of our industry. He took the opportunity to try out some of our latest Belgian-made games.
Time to show off what we can do!
Our game developers showed off their hard work to press and potential partners alike in the bustling B2B area, with the Belgian Games booth standing tall among other country pavilions and big international publishers. Visitors of the booth, made possible by Flanders Investment and Trade, could don a VR headset to try out Big Shots by AlterEyes, Hubris by Cyborn or Triangle Factory‘s recent smash hit Breachers.
At the Crazy Games booth, you could learn more about what Wired calls “the best collection of Flash games on the web right now” and Happy Volcano was proudly showing off their upcoming RE:NEW/ALL, a game about cleaning up polluted locations.
Some of our Belgian titles also used gamescom 23 to announce their big news, like Gazzler‘s 14th of September release date and Koira‘s partnership with DON’T NOD as their publisher.
Games & beers: a perfect fit
Belgium has amazing games, without a doubt! … but we’re also known for our equally amazing beers! Our Belgian Beer Café has become a yearly tradition at gamescom and makes for the perfect time to talk over some cold homebrew beers and forge new bonds or catch up on our latest achievements.
What’s next?
We’ve barely recovered from Gamescom 2023 but it’s already time to prep ourselves for the next big gathering of Belgian game developers at UNWRAP Festival. On October 12-13, UNWRAP will take the stage, bringing together the dynamic forces of the entertainment industry. Be sure to grab your tickets so you don’t miss out on this local event!
An originally small Flemish studio with humble origins in Ghent growing into a developer powerhouse with multiple studios across the globe is no ordinary news. That same company working on a world-class series like Baldur’s Gate rightfully deserves our attention. That’s why we’d like to take a moment to highlight Larian Studios’ remarkable journey that brought them to developing Baldur’s Gate 3.
The cobbled road to Baldur’s Gate 3
The first two titles in the Baldur’s Gate series were developed over two decades ago by Bioware, which then went on to make its own games like Dragon Age and Mass Effect. So how did Larian Studios end up working on the famous IP set in Wizards of the Coast’s magical Dungeons & Dragons universe?
Travel back with us in time all the way back to 1996 and we find Larian’s CEO Swen Vincke struggling to release a financially successful title. The road to developing a stable business was a bumpy one and after some small titles that hardly kept the lights on, work was started on their own fantasy RPG universe with Divine Divinity, which released in 2002 and would go on to become their cornerstone to success.
8 years later Divinity II released on the Xbox 360 & PlayStation 3 to critical and commercial acclaim, which further helped convince people of the studio’s potential and made it possible for the next title, Divinity: Original Sin, to collect almost $1M in funds on Kickstarter. After some delays, the game managed to sell over 500.000 copies in the first week, a success that was sorely needed, because the studio would have gone bankrupt if it failed to sell.
Around this time, the first meeting with Wizards of the Coast happened, when Swen flew to the US to ask the juggernaut publisher if they could work on the Baldur’s Gate franchise. After all, no other studio in the world but them would be up to the task. But it wasn’t enough to convince the IP owners yet.
Then came Divinity: Original Sin II. The studio’s second crowdfunded project not only met but exceeded expectations, with the initial funding goal of $500,000 achieved within hours. Not only was it a huge financial success, the title also holds an impressive 95 average score on Metacritic.
Sealing the deal
Larian Studios expanded its horizons and released versions of Divinity: Original Sin II for all platforms, attracting an even wider audience. Building on this success, the studio has opened multiple studios in cities around the world. Larian Studios currently boasts a workforce of over 400 employees. Growth that was needed to seal the deal with Wizards of the Coast.
A second talk about working on Baldur’s Gate 3 went a lot easier and development started in 2017, with an Early Access launch in 2020 and players all over the world seeing first-hand how much love and care was put into this world. Development continued and now, in August 2023, the game is ready to be played in its entirety. With other RPG developers even warning us not to take this level of detail for granted and raising the standards very high as BG3 has over 174 hours of recorded footage.
Impact on our local games industry
There is no denying the positive effect that Larian Studios has had on the Flemish and Belgian games industry, providing a large percentage of our industry’s earnings, employing people in the Ghent (and international) studios and motivating students in schools like Howest DAE and LUCA School of Arts to one day work for the world-class studio. Larian Studios also supports local initiatives to help grow the industry and has been FLEGA’s Gold sponsor for many years, for which we are eternally grateful.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is currently sitting at the very top of Steam’s best sellers and is positioned to sell millions of copies globally, over the years to come. Larian Studios excels in its communication with its community and has shown the world what our region is capable of. We’re very excited for the future!
You’ve been waiting for it, we know. Great news: the Flanders Game Hub is now ready to onboard its first studios in not one but two incubation programs! Applications for the first round are now open. What’s in it for me, you say? Read on and you’ll be glad you didn’t miss this.
Let’s start with reminding you what the Flanders Game Hub is about. Launched as a brand-new incubation and boost program within Flanders’ game industry, Flanders Game Hub (or FGH) is there to boost talented game companies with a great game project, empower their growth so the entire game community in Flanders will thrive. The coaching programs are one of the many initiatives that the Flanders Game Hub will facilitate and they are two-bound. Depending on the maturity and needs of your studio, you will be part of the SPARK (incubation) or IGNITE (boost) program.
Startups or aspiring startups: the SPARK program is yours!
The SPARK program is designed for young and aspiring studios looking to make their first mark. Over the course of 12 months, Flanders Game Hub will guide you through two important modules: production and business. You’ll work on your project according to production milestones and will work towards an excellent vertical slice and pitch readiness to nail your next funding round. Throughout the program, you’ll receive support and guidance from experienced industry professionals. Moreover, you’ll have a dedicated coach with a proven track record of successful game releases to guide you. All of the experts are 100% paid for by the Flanders Game Hub. Expertise is what the Flanders Game Hub invests in.
Who can apply for FGH SPARK?
young and ambitious game studios based in Flanders or Flemish companies based inBrussels
That have an awesome and commercially viable concept for a first game
Have started or are in the process of starting a company
Are available for weekly meetings, it being expert sessions or coaching sessions
And are full-time devoted on developing their game
More mature projects or studios: IGNITE is your call.
The IGNITE program is for game studios operating for less than 5 years and have released a game. Selected studios can apply for additional technical and business expertise, with Flanders Game Hub financing up to 50% of the expert costs. The IGNITE program focuses on improving your studio’s workflows to a professional standard, empowering you to achieve long-term success.
Who can apply for FGH IGNITE?
game studios based in Flanders or Flemish companies based inBrussels
That have been around for some time (more than 2 and less than 5 years),
That released their first game on a commercial platform,
Have the budget/time to work on their current game project
And have the rightmindset to professionalize and learn from experts
After sending in your application via this form, you’ll have an intake call with the Flanders Game Hub Incubation manager to evaluate your goals, needs and motivation. You’ll then start preparing your pitch. On October 11th, a jury of game industry experts will decide which studios will be selected for each of the coaching programs. Both coaching programs are set to begin in the first week of November, 2023.
Flanders Game Hub was founded by the Department of Media, Howest-DAE, Luca School of Arts, DAE Studios, Hangar K, FLEGA, VAF, VLAIO, and FIT. With the support of various actors in the Flemish video game environment, Flanders Game Hub forms the driving force behind a strong game and entertainment XR industry in Flanders.
Welcome to the 2nd blog version of the Game for Thought series (GFT), this is a written recap of Howest DAE’s live stream series that tackles ethically-relevant topics in the games industry and explores the impact & implications of industry developments.
Reason enough for us, here at FLEGA, to communicate these topics and challenges as widely as possible. In this blog recap of the livestream, we’ll break down the most important talking points of the panel, but for those who prefer to watch the entire video, you can find it below.
In this Game For Thought panel, we will explore the significance of ‘identity’ within games/digital entertainment and why it deserves attention. We will examine how identity impacts work experience in an industry that has faced challenges regarding diversity, and discuss the current approaches to diversity practices within the games industry. Furthermore, we will explore how studios/organizations can promote genuine representation and how this influences the player experience.
What is the state of diversity in the industry today?
Rilla Khaled: Over the last 10 years, things have definitely improved, but there is still a long way to go. There are also apparent differences between the AAA industry, indies and everything in between, in regards to what people are willing to risk. It’s often the smaller studios that are willing to tell stories that come from communities and groups that we might call equity-seeking.
Olivier Madiba: We see more and more studies trying to keep diversity in mind, but it’s very important to have visionary people who are willing to invest in this. You’re much more likely to find them in Silicon Valley than in Africa, and when they send someone over it’s a person with no energy, asking difficult questions that are relevant to countries where the industry is already in full swing, but not for us where we are still trying to build everything from scratch.
But this isn’t just an African thing, when you talk to black developers in the US, you’ll often hear the same struggles around representation. We’re losing out on new games, stories and creative approaches by limiting ourselves in such a way.
Nille Allard: As a young student, I haven’t been around long enough to see an evolution. But I’m on board with Olivier in that allowing people to tell their own stories would be a nice step forward.
Kaidan Geurts: There has been some improvement when it comes to queer representation. A few years back you’d see no trans characters in videogames, or when you did, they were the topic of a joke. If you look at more recent examples like The Last of Us 2, a few queer characters are represented very well and even voiced by a trans actor.
How can we make sure games represent minorities correctly?
Olivier Madiba: Even in our studio with mostly Cameroon devs, we struggled to find our own authenticity because we had no reference. Our own developers only had experience with Western or Asian characters designs, and they had never attempted to sculpt an African haircut before, for example. We also wanted to design African characters with interesting backstories, but at the same time, they needed to have a universal appeal, so the game would still sell in other countries.
Because our main character is an African woman, we aimed for female representation within the team and tried to hire enough women, but it was always a minority because it was challenging to find female developers. The geek culture is still pretty fresh in Africa, and even more so among women.
One sad thing is that we still crunch a lot. We don’t have the proper training in the country so we compensate by working twice as hard to keep up, and stay late hours in the office. But for women, this poses an additional challenge as it can be unsafe for them to travel home after dark. And when they are older and want to build a family, it becomes even more of a problem.
To solve this, we’ll have to organize around the available time of our female developers, because we do see their added value. You can’t have a game about a female hero, without women weighing in on the designs and backstory.
Rilla Khaled: The problem with the under-representation of women in games starts further upstream, before the workplace, in schools. I started as the only woman in a class of 300 men, which wasn’t always easy.
But before we dig into authenticity, I want to point out that it’s a terribly loaded word. For people of a certain identity, you’ll never truly get it correct, even if you work with other people with similar backgrounds. That would suggest that there is some kind of essentialist truth on how to portray a particular identity.
It’s more accurate to say there are less and more ethical ways of working, and the more ethical way is to include people from the communities that you want to represent, and allowing them to push the major decision-making. And it’s vital that they are people who have been assigned the correct role and that you don’t force them to play too many roles at the same time. If you’re making a game about Canadian culture, for example, have indigenous artists work on the art, and indigenous writers work on the story.
iAsia Brown: I’ve seen characters being created from a stereotypical lens that almost look like caricatures. Even if you’re aligned to, an ally of or just have a passion for the people you are trying to authentically represent, you can’t create a character with an unbiased lens. If I ask anyone to describe someone of a race or ethnicity other than theirs, it will come with a built-in bias. What descriptors are you using, and who taught you them? Your normal may not be their reality.
In 2023 it’s possible to find creators from across the spectrum, but companies aren’t always doing their due diligence to search for them and pay them what they are worth. Especially if they aren’t as well-known yet.
I don’t care about anybody’s comfort zone or bubble. It’s a responsibility for everyone that’s in the room. Very often I show up the only woman in the room, I show up the only black person in the room, I show up the only queer woman in the room. But it’s my responsibility, because I’m in that room, to suggest bringing in the people no one else has mentioned yet. If you’re in the room, you’re already in the tree of trust. Bring somebody else in. If you’re in there, and you’re not saying anything, you’re gatekeeping just as well, and you’re part of the problem. If we’re not using our voices, we’re doing the entire industry a disservice.
Kaidan Geurts: Indeed, it’s important to acknowledge the bias that we have, even if that makes certain people uncomfortable. It’s important to step outside that comfort zone, so we can grow as an industry.
What is the importance of representation at its essence?
Nille Allard: I think it’s important for future generations. As a white person, I’ve never had a problem seeing myself represented in games or movies. But it’s rarer to see queer or even female characters represented as something other than the stereotypical archetypes. And it’s something that can have a very limiting impact, while it really shouldn’t.
Rilla Khaled: Representation is everything. I grew up surrounded by white media, and it felt like I didn’t exist. We don’t see ourselves. This is the main reason why we should be talking about these topics. We deserve to exist in the media that we consume. Even from a marketing or financial perspective, media that feels like home, still has so much untapped potential. I want to fix this for my kids. The media needs to reflect all of us.
iAsia Brown: If you didn’t see someone similar to yourself do a great thing, you may think you’re not capable of doing great things. You need someone to pave the way. Women didn’t think they could be pilots until they saw other female pilots. Men didn’t think they could be cheerleaders until they saw other male cheerleaders. Women didn’t think they could be in politics until they saw female politicians. You have to know that it’s possible in order to make it a reality for yourself.
Kaidan Geurts: I agree, you can’t be what you can’t see. And I think the majority of people would profit from breaking stereotypes. I hope better representation can create more empathy. You don’t have to share the identity of someone to feel the same struggles.
Olivier Madiba: I didn’t realize until I grew up that I was underrepresented because I wasn’t confronted with Western media yet. But now I realize the importance of the impact we have on future generations. People may not remember us as persons in 2000 years, even if we’re millionaires, but we have still played a part in the chain of inspiration that will have an impact on our media many years from now.
Nille Allard: At DAE, I didn’t feel part of a minority, because we had a bubble of queer friends that we engaged with and the split of female/male-presenting students was almost 50/50 in our field. But at my first internship, there were only 2 women in a group of 12.
On one of my first days, someone complained about having to model a gender-neutral character. And because I’m mostly fem-presenting, due to my long hair, they felt way too comfortable talking to me about this, not realising they were complaining about a nonbinary character I would have related to. Because I was “just” an intern and he was a full-time employee, I didn’t have the guts to say anything about it.
iAsia Brown: I would like to give some kind advice: remove the word “just” from your vocabulary. When you use “just”, you minimize. You shrink. You get smaller. And when you get smaller, you stay silent. A haircut does not define you, nor does a student/employee status. It can be enough to say “that’s inappropriate” and you let THEM self-reflect.
Rilla Khaled: There are many power-structures working against you in that moment. But as you get older, it will become easier to tell people they are out of line. If you’d have said “I’m gender-queer” you could signal that they messed up in a non-confrontational way, and they’d have to sit with that and work out what to say next.
What are some examples of media that do representation right?
iAsia Brown:Tell Me Why by DON’T NOD was the first AAA title to feature a transgender person as a main character and use a trans person as the voice actor. It’s about two identical twins, but one of them is transgender and the focus isn’t on their gender, but on the decisions they make and how they have to go forward, not knowing what the other choice would have lead to.
Rilla Khaled: The game I want to tell you about is one that grew out of a workshops series called “skins” that is organised by the Initiative for Indigenous Futures. It’s called He Ao Hou: A New World, and it was entirely indigenous-lead. We even had the cultural representatives and elders around who had conversations with the Hawaiian devs and artists. It’s a game about a Hawaiian space traveler, colonising space, but we also didn’t want to rethread traumatizing topics because Hawaii was also colonised.
Kaidan Geurts: I did a case study on an indiegame called Hardcoded, which is an adult dating game about trans people and androids in a dystopian cyberpunk setting. My case study was about the representation of trans people and their sexuality in videogames and I realized not a lot of games do both. In Hardcoded, there are a lot of trans characters, but they don’t make a big deal out of it, the stories weren’t about their trans-identity, but who they were outside those definitions. It was normalized, which was really refreshing to me.
Olivier Madiba: In Metal Gear Solid 3 “the Boss” is the first time I saw such a powerful woman. She wasn’t just a man in a dress. She demanded respect and felt like a true hero. It was the first female role in a game that really made an impact on me, and I decided then and there to make a game that does it right as well. Aurion, the game we worked on, has female heroes as the lead characters and is meant to inspire Africans to build a better world.
Nille Allard: A Tv-show I watched recently was Our Flag Means Death, with Vico Ortiz playing Jim, who is canonically a nonbinary character, played by a nonbinary actor*. It was really nice to have this kind of representation.
*editor’s note: The Umbrella Academy also handles this well with Elliot Page who transitioned in between seasons and they wove this into the show’s narrative in a respectful way.
Rilla Khaled: It’s good that we no longer feel the need to make media for the majority of the population. When such characters feel normal in the world they are in, that’s when we know we’re on the right path.
About Game For Thought
Game For Thought (GFT) is a livestream series launched by Howest – Digital Arts and Entertainment (DAE) in collaboration with local medialab Quindo and sponsored by Vlaams Audiovisueel Fonds (VAF), it tackles ethically-relevant topics in the games industry and explores the impact & implications of industry developments. Each broadcast, Allie Weis, ethics coordinator at Howest DAE, invites a selection of industry experts to discuss the topic at hand.
The Belgian Game Awards 2023 were hosted in a crowded venue at La Sucrerie in Wavre on Friday the 23rd of June. Over 50 homegrown games were submitted, and our seven-headed professional jury has chosen the best games in various categories after getting some personal hands-on with our country’s finest creative projects.
Furthermore, the audience at home got to vote for their favourite title, the best studio and most-promising upcoming studio were chosen and the best local esports events got to compete against each other for the illustrious awards.
Without further ado, let’s get to the list of winners:
Ghost on the Shore is an exploration game about emotional ties that transcend even death. Riley is faced with a headstrong ghost, urging her on an adventure across atmospheric shores, uncovering the island’s tragic secret. Irrevocable choices in dialogue shape the bond between the two, ultimately deciding Riley’s fate. The story is what drives this title and that is why we celebrate its narrative achievements.
The music in Please, Touch the Artwork perfectly fits the relaxed atmosphere. The soothing soundtrack adds tremendous value to the gameplay experience. You truly feel as though you’ve entered a museum, and are walking through interactive exhibits with no stress, nothing distracting you from the main essence of the game… Each puzzle is accompanied by a tune that lets you sit back, immerse yourself in the virtual museum experience, and simply enjoy some artistic puzzling fun.
Spookware’s unique main characters scuffle through an interesting twist of cartoony 2D & realistic 3D assets that could remind many players of the Paper Mario series. On the contrary, the eerie mini-games, drawing inspiration from WarioWare, showcase an abundance of diverse visual designs with a style that is uniquely their own.
Hubris is a VR action-adventure game set in a unique and colourful Sci-Fi universe, with immersive movement options, including swimming, climbing, and jumping. Players will have to gather resources, craft food and upgrade their weapons to fight off alien wildlife, droids, and humanoid enemies. It pushed the boundaries of what’s possible in VR and turned out to be one of the best-looking VR titles available.
A second trophy for touching the art? Looks like breaking the golden rule of museums pays off! In Please, Touch the Artwork you explore the secret worlds behind 3 iconic Mondrian paintings. It’s not only a relaxing puzzle experience, but it also teaches you about a world-renowned artist and could even inspire players to visit a museum. (where, hopefully, they can resist following the advice in the title)
🏆 Winner:9 Months by Joran De Pessemier – DAE Howest
A short but deeply moving game in which you deal with the theme of grief in an unexpected way. The gameplay is simple, but achieves its goal of telling a touching story through the means of an interactive videogame and leaving a lasting mark on everyone that plays it.
Godspear Games, has a background in serious games and has demonstrated their skills in transforming ideas into enjoyable videogames. Their upcoming title, Textbound Tales, is a captivating game that revives the beloved text-based RPG genre, and accompanies it with an amazing cartoony visual style. The plan is to grow the studio to a team of ~5 people within the next 4 years.
You Suck at Parking and The Almost Gone are meticulously crafted games that exhibited exceptional quality right from their initial release. These games exemplify the studio’s remarkable skills and illustrate how a seemingly straightforward concept can transform into an unforgettable experience when executed flawlessly. Beyond the games themselves, the studio fosters an open, inclusive, and non-crunch environment that prioritizes the well-being of its team. They serve as an excellent model for effective teamwork, and this ethos is reflected in the games they develop.
Warhammer 40,000 Shootas, Blood & Teef is a highly accessible game that offers multiplayer functionalities, including a versus mode that significantly expands the potential for hosting tournaments within the game.
The Elite Series competitions are the highest echelon of Benelux esports and the stepping stone for local talent to international stardom across titles like League of Legends, Valorant and Rocket League. The official LoL-league features the best 8 League of Legends teams in the Benelux, each aiming to win their share of the €28,000 prize pool and earn the chance to represent the Benelux in the EMEA Masters.
You Suck at Parking is the world’s most EXTREME parking game, and the only racing game where your goal is to stop. Drive, drift, and park in this simple & accessible yet challenging game where parking is more important than your driving skills. Collect cars, learn new mechanics, challenge the world, and customize your ride in this ever-evolving parking simulator. The people have spoken!
Spookware is a wonderful mix of frantic fast-paced minigames and a funny adventure with an amazing visual style. It has heart, feels fresh and leaves a distinct impact on everyone that plays it. It bursts with creativity and makes you hunger for more. And remember to drink your milk, it’s good for your bones!
So there you have it! The 12 winners of the Belgian Game Awards 2023 are known, and we’ll celebrate their legacy forever!
Did you miss the show LIVE? Don’t worry, you can watch the video on VRT MAX or RTBF AUVIO!
We had a chance to party after the show, but now there is work to be done: We’ll get started on planning the next edition straight away and collect feedback from everyone involved to make it one for the history books!