Larian Studios
More info
- Creator
- Swen Vincke
- Founded
- Type
- Game developer (independent)
- Website
- larian.com
The Belgian RPG studio that scraped by for nearly thirty years before Baldur's Gate 3 made it a household name.
Swen Vincke founded the studio in Ghent in 1996 and spent a decade near bankruptcy between Divine Divinity and work-for-hire. Divinity: Original Sin (2014), partly Kickstarter-funded, revived the classic party-based CRPG, and its 2017 sequel broke through widely. Baldur's Gate 3 (2023), built on fifth-edition Dungeons & Dragons, won game of the year almost everywhere and proved an independent studio could ship a AAA production with no publisher pulling the strings. Larian then pointedly declined to make sequels on demand.