11 BelgianGamesIndustry feats that deserve a big round of applause

  Christophe De bont        10/10/2017

It’s only been two months since we did a similar round-up of amazing achievements accomplished by Belgian game studios, but our gamedevs just keep racking them up! Here are 11 amazing feats we all should get our hands together for.

• How could we lead this piece with anyhing else than the massive success of Divinity: Original Sin 2? Hailed by critics worldwide as one of the best RPG’s of all time, it currently holds an unbelievable score of 94 at Metacritic, sitting comfortably among legendary games like Diablo, The Witcher III: Wild Hunt and Baldur’s Gate II. The game has done the business as well, selling over 500,000 copies in its opening weekend. We all knew Larian was onto something big, but these figures vastly surmount our wildest expectations.
• We already know Belgium is a fine place to learn the noble trade of game development. Thanks to HOWEST DAE’s recent win of the Best Game Design School award at The Rookies competition, now the whole world knows. Beating respected international competition, the best game school in the world made the headlines of (inter)national tv journals, websites and newspapers.

Divinity: Original Sin 2 annihilating the competition

• Talking about press, both Guns, Gore & Cannoli 2 and Flotsam were featured on Gamasutra, while The Almost Gone and Panoptic were picked up by The Guardian.
• Also in the wake of gamescom, eXiin took home the Best Unity Award at the Indie Arena Booth and showed off the game at Indiecade in LA last weekend.
• Cybernetic Walrus did a talk about Antigraviator at Unite Austin and were nominated for Best Student Project at the Unity Awards 17.

Ary & The Secret of Seasons (eXiin) wins at Indie Arena Booth

• Space Pirate Trainer 1.0 is almost out and Dirk Van Welden was happy to feature in a roundtable on VR games at VRDC in San Francisco.
• The self proclaimed augmented reality rockstars at World of Waw get to work their AR magic on a project for Dutch amusement park, De Efteling.
• In other AR news, Triangle Factory created AR Sports: Basketball – a fun basketball throwing game using Apple’s ARKit. Check out the video!

• FLEGA chairman Bernard François gave a talk at Austin GameCon about rapid game prototyping.
• Niceberg Studios managed to strike a funding deal with a business angel through BAN Vlaanderen.
• And last but not least, Cloudalize launched PixelStellar, a new cloud platform aimed at gamers that want to play the latest games without needing a powerful gaming pc.

A big round of applause to everyone! Keep up the good work and let’s make this round-up a regular thing!