Diversity & Inclusion reports and market data
Documents
What the mobile games industry needs to do to get mainstream recognition
Mobile eSports currently occupies an early developmental stage, mirroring the foundational era of PC competitive gaming.
- Mobile eSports is currently in a foundational development phase, mirroring the early era of PC competitive gaming but positioned for rapid expansion due to its massive global user base.
- To achieve mainstream normalization, the industry must prioritize professional-grade technical features, specifically robust spectator modes, custom game lobbies, and rigorous anti-cheat protocols.
- Establishing competitive integrity through advanced technical infrastructure is a prerequisite for attracting the consistent brand sponsorships necessary for industry maturity.
Crush the Norm: Diversity Rules (At King)
Game development requires a fundamental shift in character creation, moving away from reliance on traditional stereotypes toward a process that prioritizes personality and narrative depth before defining physical attributes.
- King has spent the last 18 months embedding a diversity mapping framework into its development pipeline to systematically move character design away from traditional Western stereotypes.
- The diversity mapping framework functions as an analytical tool that benchmarks character rosters against industry norms to identify and mitigate biases like the centering of whiteness and uniform body types.
- Effective character creation requires prioritizing personality and narrative depth before defining physical attributes to ensure more inclusive and original global representation.
Breaking Marginalized Character Narrative Molds to Write Better, Richer Characters
The prevailing reliance on the cisgender, able-bodied white male as the default protagonist in video games frequently results in generic, imperialist archetypes that lack genuine relatability.
- Developers must move beyond the default cisgender, able-bodied white male protagonist to avoid generic, imperialist archetypes and foster deeper character relatability.
- Authentic representation requires grounding protagonists in specific, deliberate cultural and personal histories, as demonstrated in the narrative approach of Treachery in Beatdown City.
- Writers should avoid reducing marginalized characters to one-dimensional stereotypes or trauma-based plot devices, a failure observed in titles like Mafia III and Watch Dogs 2.
Smash Sisters: Fostering Camaraderie from the Ground Up
Smash Sisters functions as a grassroots initiative within the Super Smash Bros. community, specifically designed to increase female participation and retention through team-based crew battles.
- Smash Sisters increases female participation and retention in the Super Smash Bros. community by replacing high-stakes individual brackets with team-based crew battles.
- The initiative utilizes a decentralized, feedback-driven model that empowers local leaders to manage events while maintaining consistent branding and safety standards.
- By prioritizing social integration over competitive prize pools, the program lowers barriers to entry and serves as a welcoming supplement to the broader co-ed tournament scene.
Game Accessibility: Practical Visual Fixes from EA's Madden NFL Franchise
The integration of accessibility features into the Madden NFL franchise demonstrates that significant improvements for players with visual impairments can be achieved through cost-effective, software-based solutions.
- Accessibility features can be integrated into AAA titles with minimal resources, as demonstrated by a single developer implementing these changes for Madden NFL 17 within a one-month timeframe.
- High-impact visual improvements for low-vision players include enlarging pass icons, standardizing UI placement, and providing user-adjustable brightness and contrast controls.
- Modified color-shifting algorithms are superior to standard color-blind filters, which often compress color ranges and negatively impact gameplay clarity.
Evolve: An Adventure in Accessibility Retrofitting
Retrofitting accessibility into existing game titles requires a systematic evaluation process that prioritizes features based on their reach, impact, and implementation effort.
- Retrofitting accessibility is most cost-effective when integrated during pre-production, but when applied to existing titles, success requires a systematic scorecard approach to prioritize features based on reach, impact, and implementation effort.
- Accessibility features provide universal benefits that raise the skill floor for all players without negatively impacting the experience for high-skill users.
- Key technical strategies for retrofitting include implementing customizable control schemes, centralizing accessibility settings into dedicated menus, and replacing subtle UI cues with prominent, icon-based notifications.
Making girly games that aren’t patronising
The gaming industry suffers from a systemic bias that devalues femininity, leading to a cycle where games marketed toward women are often dismissed as inferior or relegated to low-quality shovelware.
- The industry's systemic devaluation of femininity originated from a 1983 market shift that pivoted exclusively toward teenage male demographics, cementing a long-standing bias against female-oriented content.
- Games marketed toward women are frequently relegated to low-quality shovelware, creating a self-fulfilling cycle where poor design reinforces the stigma that feminine themes lack artistic merit.
- High-quality titles like Style Savvy, Mystic Messenger, and Toca Hair Salon prove that traditionally feminine themes—such as fashion and social simulation—can support complex, deep, and well-designed gameplay mechanics.
How to create agile teams and foster the culture of excellence while developing games
Effective game development requires a shift from managing individual talent to fostering a cohesive team mentality.
- Shift leadership focus from managing individual talent to building a cohesive, collaborative unit that functions as a single entity.
- Foster team ownership by ensuring every developer understands how their specific tasks contribute to the project's overall business success.
- Establish a culture of psychological safety to ensure all team members, including introverts, feel comfortable voicing concerns and identifying bottlenecks early.
Portrayals and Pitfalls of Fatness in Games
Video games frequently perpetuate systemic fatphobia by relying on reductive tropes that equate larger body types with moral failings, incompetence, or comedic relief.
- Video game character design frequently reinforces systemic fatphobia by using larger body types as shorthand for moral failings, incompetence, or comedic relief.
- Fat characters are often relegated to the 'sitcom effect,' where their physical appearance is treated as a punchline or an object of pity rather than a component of a well-rounded character.
- Nuanced representations of fat characters remain rare outliers, with titles like Borderlands 2, Pokémon X/Y, and Saints Row serving as exceptions to an industry-wide lack of body diversity.
Knights, Fist Fights, Lasers & Catacombs: Subversive Diversity to Improve Our Games
Meaningful diversity in game development requires moving beyond superficial aesthetics to integrate inclusive design from the earliest stages of production.
- Diversity in game development should be an intentional design choice integrated from the beginning of production, rather than a superficial veneer added at the end, to avoid it being easily discarded or poorly implemented.
- Developers should avoid relying on lazy tropes, such as assigning specific gender roles to character stats or using 'color-swapped' character models that lack unique backstories, as seen in games like Crypt of the NecroDancer where character models were identical despite different skin tones.
- Inclusive character design requires authentic representation; for instance, developers should consult with diverse teams to avoid harmful stereotypes, such as the inaccurate depiction of black hair in Broken Age.
Corporate Responsibility Report 2017
Modern Times Group (MTG) presented a comprehensive overview of its corporate responsibility performance for 2017, positioning itself as a global digital-entertainment leader with approximately 3,700 employees and net sales of €16-17 billion SEK.
- MTG reported a 49.7% increase in total greenhouse-gas emissions in 2017 compared to 2016, with air travel accounting for approximately 70% of the company's total emissions.
- While MTG achieved near-gender parity in Sweden and Finland at 48%, female representation at the senior-executive level remained low at 20%, and women earned only 66–67% of the basic salary of their male counterparts.
- The company set a formal target to achieve a 50/50 gender balance across its workforce by 2020.
Because Games Matter - A Better Vision - Extra Credits
The narrative centers on the transformative power of video games as a therapeutic tool for individuals with visual impairments.
- Video games can facilitate neuroplasticity, allowing the brain to better interpret limited visual signals and improve functional sight through repetitive hand-eye coordination.
- A patient with ocular albinism improved her visual acuity from 20/200 to 20/100 over a two-year period by using structured gaming, such as Pokémon Red and Breakout, as a form of visual rehabilitation.
- This improvement in visual acuity enabled the patient to transition from using large-print materials to standard text, significantly increasing her daily independence.