The Game Awards statue was for Larian's new game, Divinity, a new RPG that's "even larger than Baldur's Gate 3

The mystery of Geoff Keighley's demonic demon statue in the desert has been solved, and it belongs to Baldur's Gate 3 developer Larian, as suspected. More to the point, the statue was there to promote Larian's just-announced new role-playing game Divinity.
The game will be the next entry in Larian's homegrown Divinity series, which began back in 2002 with Divine Divinity, but didn't really take off until Divinity: Original Sin was released in 2014. (I once spoke to Larian founder Swen Vincke about Divinity's origins and the studio had tried to make Original Sin as its first game, in the late '90s, before being pulled out of position by publishers.)
On its announcemet, Larian founder Swen Vincke said: "Despite our long history with the series, this is our first game entitled 'Divinity'. We're ready to bring everything we've done previously into one place. This marks the beginning of something with more breadth, depth, and intimacy than anything we've created before. We've been building toward this moment ever since we took our fate into our own hands.
"This is the Divinity weve always wanted to make and you're going to have loads of fun with it."
The mystery of the desert statue has been building since the start of December, when The Game Awards creator and host Geoff Keighley shared a photo of a gruesome kind of doorway, decorated by various creatures in tortured poses carved as if trying to break free from it. The doorway seemed to stand alone in the Mojave Desert. Speculation quickly arose around what the doorway could be promoting, ranging from a possible FromSoftware game to something from Diablo, Doom or God of War.
Earlier this week, however, the connection to Larian was made, the clues coming from new Divinity trademarks registered in Europe, the logos for which bore more than a passing resemblance to the spindly legged design of the statue.
The question of how Larian would follow Baldur's Gate 3 has been whizzing around ever since that game captivated the game-playing world in 2023. Larian has always been fairly open about its desire not to do a sequel but move onto new things. To that end, Larian announced in 2024 that it was working on two new projects, both based on the studio's own franchises, or IP - the most well known of those obviously being Divinity.
"After six years in [Dungeons & Dragons setting] Forgotten Realms and much discussion and rumination, we've decided to seize this opportunity to develop our own IPs," Swen Vincke said at the time. "We're currently working on two new projects and we couldn't be more excited about what the future has in store."