Diversity & Inclusion reports and market data
Documents
Developer Satisfaction Survey 2023: Diversity Report
The 2023 Developer Satisfaction Survey provides a comprehensive demographic and professional profile of the global game development workforce.
- The game industry experienced significant instability in 2023, resulting in 10,500 layoffs despite 88% of developers relying on the sector for their total income.
- Workplace diversity remains stagnant, with only 28% of developers perceiving an increase in industry diversity over the last two years.
- Infrastructure for equity and inclusion is lacking, as 28% of employers have no formal programs, and only 38% of workplaces maintain a formal complaint procedure.
CD PROJEKT Group Sustainability Report: 2022
The CD PROJEKT Group’s 2022 sustainability reporting serves to formalize the integration of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria into the company’s core business strategy.
- CD PROJEKT Group reported 953 million PLN in consolidated revenue for 2022 while managing a workforce of 1,292 employees.
- The company’s carbon footprint totaled 323,203 tCO2e, with 99.5% of these emissions originating from Scope 3 downstream activities.
- The organization maintains a 32% female workforce representation and recorded a 14.3% employee turnover rate during the 2022 fiscal year.
Keynote: Workplace Connection & Community.
This presentation outlines strategies for fostering workplace connection and community within the gaming industry, specifically drawing on the experiences of Product Madness.
- Product Madness maintains organizational culture during rapid growth and remote work by focusing on five pillars: storytelling, common language, symbolism, rituals, and cultural ambassadors.
- The company established five core guiding principles to create a common language that bridges the gap between global studios and remote employees.
- To foster a unified identity, the organization implemented visual symbols including a redesigned company logo and branded learning materials.
Employment and Career Development of Game Developers 2022
The Japanese game industry is characterized by a workforce primarily composed of male university graduates in their mid-thirties, predominantly concentrated within large enterprises in the Kanto region.
- The Japanese game industry workforce is primarily composed of male university graduates in their mid-thirties, with engineers serving as the core labor force earning an average annual income of 6.06 million yen.
- Nearly 75% of game developers now operate in remote work settings, a shift that has improved perceived work-life balance but created new challenges for interpersonal collaboration and workplace support.
- Significant salary disparities persist between large corporations and smaller firms, with executive, management, and technical artist roles commanding the highest compensation.
Inclusive Marketing for Indies
Inclusive marketing for independent game studios requires a framework rooted in intersectionality, which acknowledges how various aspects of identity—such as race, gender, sexuality, and disability—interact to shape experiences of systemic inequality.
- Inclusive marketing for indie studios must be rooted in intersectionality, which accounts for how overlapping identities like race, gender, and disability shape systemic inequality.
- Content strategy should prioritize authentic representation over tokenism and treat accessibility as a foundational design requirement rather than an afterthought.
- Communication strategies must actively elevate diverse voices by diversifying the network of journalists and influencers engaged for promotion.
European Commission Proposal for a Regulation Laying Down Rules to Prevent and Combat Child Sexual Abuse
The position presented by Video Games Europe and the European Games Developer Federation seeks to shape the European Commission’s proposed regulation on child sexual abuse online by emphasizing that interactive video-game environments already embody a robust, safety-by-design framework.
- Video Games Europe and the European Games Developer Federation argue that gaming platforms should be exempt from uniform high-risk regulatory models because they already utilize safety-by-design frameworks.
- Data from the 2021 NCMEC Cybertipline indicates that incidents of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and grooming are significantly lower on video game services compared to platforms focused on photo or video sharing.
- A 2020 Ofcom/ICO survey of 4,000 respondents found that only 2% of adults and 3% of children reported experiencing harms via video game play.
Llibre Blanc d’Accessibilitat per al Desenvolupament de Videojocs
The central thesis is that video-game accessibility must be embedded from the earliest design stages, using a standardized, non-subjective evaluation framework, to achieve universal inclusion while avoiding the steep costs of retro-fitting.
- Accessibility must be integrated during early design phases to avoid the high costs of retrofitting, utilizing the European EN 301 549 ICT-accessibility standard as a foundational framework.
- The global gaming market includes over three billion players, with approximately 400 million individuals living with a disability and 18 million regular players in Spain.
- The Ga11y portal, launched in July 2022, provides a catalogue of 28 star-rated accessibility guidelines that map specific technical solutions to visual, auditory, motor, speech, and cognitive impairments.
Libro Blanco de Accesibilidad para Desarrolladores
The core thesis emphasizes that video-game accessibility must be embedded from the earliest design stages, rather than added later, because retro-fitting dramatically inflates development time and cost.
- Accessibility must be integrated during the earliest design stages to avoid the significant cost and time inflation associated with retrofitting features.
- Approximately 400 million of the 3 billion global gamers live with some form of disability, making inclusive design a critical market consideration.
- The framework categorizes over 30 accessibility measures into a 5-star system, ranging from basic joystick swapping and puzzle-skipping to advanced sign-language interpretation and text-to-voice features.
Annual Report 2023: Canada
The 2023 annual review underscores a year of extraordinary expansion for Canada’s video-game industry, positioning the nation as a pre-eminent global hub for development talent and creative output.
- Canada’s video game industry experienced extraordinary expansion in 2023, solidifying its status as a global hub for development talent and creative output.
- Canadian studios achieved record-breaking international award recognition and critical acclaim throughout the 2023 calendar year.
- The sector deepened its export revenues in 2023, significantly increasing its contribution to the national digital economy.
State of the Game Development Industry 2023: Workplace Health & HR Culture, Mental Trends
The global game development industry entered a period of profound instability throughout 2023, characterized by widespread layoffs affecting 28% of the workforce and a pervasive crisis of employee loyalty.
- The game industry experienced significant instability in 2023, with 28% of the workforce affected by layoffs and an Employee Net Promoter Score of -19% indicating widespread dissatisfaction.
- Economic recalibration and management failures are the primary drivers of industry distress, while AI automation currently accounts for only 3% of total job losses.
- Workplace culture is suffering from 'quiet hiring' practices, where 37% of employees are absorbing expanded responsibilities without corresponding increases in compensation.
State of the Game Industry 2023
The global game development landscape in 2023 is characterized by a return to established platforms and a growing skepticism toward speculative technologies.
- The industry is pivoting toward technological pragmatism, with PC as the primary development focus and PlayStation 5 as the preferred console, while interest in blockchain and the metaverse has significantly declined.
- Workplace culture is under scrutiny as 40% of the workforce reports experiencing player harassment, with community managers and marginalized groups being the most affected.
- Labor tensions are rising, characterized by majority support for unionization among developers and widespread concern regarding the market impact of large-scale studio acquisitions.
'Blackhaven' Postmortem: Designing Two Centuries of Difficult History in One Free Game
Blackhaven, a narrative-driven indie game released in 2021, serves as a case study in balancing historical accuracy with sensitive social commentary.
- To ensure historical authenticity, the development team utilized primary source documents and artifacts, such as the diary of William Byrd II and the letters of Mary Chestnut, to ground the game's narrative in the reality of 18th and 19th-century American slavery.
- The team empowered a student advisory board to have final creative control over the protagonist, Kendra Turner, including her dialogue, appearance, and reactions to microaggressions, ensuring the character's experiences were authentic and resonant.
- The game design intentionally contrasted the 'slick' modern reconstruction of the plantation museum with historical evidence of human suffering, using euphemistic language in museum displays to critique how institutions often obscure the history of slavery.