Larian Studios

One office in Ghent

Larian Studios dates its beginning to 1996, when its first office opened in Ghent, Belgium. The studio's own location pages name Swen Vincke as the founder and describe that Ghent branch as the place where the company's history started, and it is still listed as the headquarters. Three decades later the same company is one of the larger independent role-playing studios in Europe, with teams in several countries and a catalogue that runs from modest early projects to a game that collected awards for two years.

What makes the story unusual is continuity. The studio has stayed privately held and independent, and it publishes its own work: the Steam page for its best-known game credits Larian Studios as both developer and publisher. That combination is rarer than it sounds in a business where one expensive failure usually ends in an acquisition or a closure. Larian has had thin years, but it never handed its projects to somebody else to sell.

The Divinity series

The studio's own world is called Rivellon, and its games have carried the Divinity name since the late 1990s. The official catalogue lists six Divinity titles, from the first top-down adventure through the dragon-themed action games to the two Original Sin entries. The name has never meant one genre: real-time action, tactical turn-based combat and even a strategy hybrid have all sat under the same banner, which is part of why the series is harder to summarise than its reputation suggests.

Divinity: Original Sin, released in 2014, was the studio's first crowdfunded project and, in the studio's own wording, went on to collect over 150 awards and nominations. The sequel, which followed in 2017, launched with a Metacritic rating of 93 and won more than 160 awards, among them a BAFTA for best multiplayer game. Those two titles paid for what came next: without them the team would have lacked the staff, the technology and the money to attempt a licensed Dungeons & Dragons game.

Baldur's Gate 3 and the numbers

Baldur's Gate 3 arrived on 3 August 2023 after roughly three years in early access, and the official store page credits Larian as both developer and publisher. The studio's homepage states that the game received over 200 Game of the Year awards and appears on Metacritic's list of must-play games. It was a Dungeons & Dragons title made under licence, built on the combat and dialogue systems the team had refined across a decade of Divinity releases.

Sales numbers are reported rarely. In December 2025 Swen Vincke put the game beyond 20 million copies in an interview rather than in a company statement, and the studio's own sites still carry no such figure, so it is safest read as the founder's remark on that date rather than as a published statistic. Physical Deluxe Edition stock and a long run of hotfixes kept the game in the studio's news feed into 2026.

What is being made next

In December 2025 the studio announced a new Divinity game at The Game Awards. Its official page keeps the reveal deliberately vague: the teaser copy speaks of silent gods and a bleeding world, and promises an RPG larger and deeper than anything the studio has made, built by the team behind Baldur's Gate 3, before adding the frank note that this is the intention. No release window is given, and nothing has been said in public about how the game will play.

The same month, the studio brought Divinity: Original Sin 2 to current consoles, eight years after its first release, which kept the older games in front of new players while the next one is being built. Beyond the teaser the company has said little: no platforms, no date, no systems. For a studio that once talked openly about its work in progress, the quiet is itself part of the announcement.

Why does independence still matter here?

Independence is a business structure, not a virtue, so the useful question is what it permits. Larian develops and publishes its own games, which lets it fund long production cycles without answering to a storefront or a parent company's quarterly targets. It also means the studio carries the entire cost of a bad decision. In a market where large role-playing games cost many millions, that burden explains why so few studios of this size stay self-directed.

The structure also shapes what the studio can choose to build. A company that has just shipped a very large success can always repeat the formula; one that publishes its own work can spend its own money on something it owns outright instead. Whether the next Divinity is good is a separate matter, but the arrangement that lets Larian decide has been in place since 1996, when a small office in Ghent began taking risks with no publisher standing behind it.

Quick facts

Founded: 1996, in Ghent, Belgium.

Founder: Swen Vincke, named as the founder on the studio's own Gent location page, which records the first office opening there in 1996.

Headquarters: Ghent, Belgium. The studio's site also lists offices in Quebec, Dublin, Kuala Lumpur, Guildford and Barcelona.

Ownership: independent. Larian develops and publishes its own games; Steam credits Larian Studios as both developer and publisher of Baldur's Gate 3.

Key games: the six Divinity titles on the official catalogue, and Baldur's Gate 3.

Dated numbers: Baldur's Gate 3 released 3 August 2023; over 200 Game of the Year awards for it and more than 300 staff, both stated on the studio's homepage; 20 million copies is Swen Vincke's figure given in December 2025 and is not published on the studio's own sites.

Games

• Baldur's Gate 3
• Beyond Divinity
• Divine Divinity
• Divinity II
• Divinity: Dragon Commander
• Divinity: Original Sin
• Divinity: Original Sin - Enhanced Edition
• Divinity: Original Sin 2
• Monkey Tales: The Abbey of Aviath
• Superia

Questions people ask