The Secret Parallel Universe of Women-Led Games
push to talk #9 // feat. women game devs who are banding together to get their work discovered
Getting your game discovered by players is a tough challenge for anybody. So in a year when so many game devs are struggling, you love to see devs banding together to shine a light on each other’s games.
This week’s issue features interviews with a number of women who are doing just that. Go ahead, boot up Steam now and get your credit card ready. I promise you’re gonna learn about at least a few dope games you’ve never heard of before.
Find that story below. But first, this week’s games industry news links.
Scuttlebutt and Slackery
The week’s most-shared, oft-Slacked, and spiciest games industry news links.
PlayStation, EA, and Others Add to the Layoffs Wave- On Tuesday, PlayStation announced “about 900” layoffs across a broad swath of studios including Insomniac, Guerrilla, and Naughty Dog—an 8% headcount cut. EA followed on Wednesday with a 5% cut, or an estimated 670 people. Other layoff announcements came from Wildlife (133), Supermassive (~90) and Cloud Imperium (a “small number”). Total games industry job cuts in the first two months of 2024 now exceeds 8,000—near the total for all of 2022 (~8,500) and on track to exceed 2023’s count (~10,500) soon. After PlayStation’s announcement, some analysts have begun sounding the alarm about the overall health of the PS business—see image above.
How Mobile Gaming Could Come to an End - Could mobile gaming—the industry’s biggest sector, at least by revenue—really go the way of Facebook gaming? The quants at Deconstructor of Fun say actually, yeah. I know a lot of startup studios have spent the last few years pounding tables and yelling about how all the gamers want their games on mobile now. Maybe go check this post out and get your fun deconstructed. (Deconstructor of Fun)
The Uncertain Future of Apple Arcade - It’s all bad news this week! A report from mobilegamer.biz includes some damning quotes from anonymous Apple Arcade devs. From the piece: Multiple mobilegamer.biz sources have voiced their concern for Apple Arcade’s future, citing a glut of cancelled projects and ever-declining developer payouts. One developer said there was the “the smell of death” around the service – though others suggested there are now whispers of (another) reboot for the service. This one’s worth a read. (mobilegamer.biz)
Rumors: Switch 2 is Coming March 2025 - We’re in total speculation land here, so proceed accordingly. But this week VGC quoted a paywalled article by Nikkei saying that despite initially targeting the 2024 holiday season for a Switch sequel launch, Nintendo has moved the timeline back to 2025 “to ensure the initial inventory of the successor console and a lineup of software titles at the time of its launch.” (Video Games Chronicle)
Remembering Twitch Plays Pokémon - Okay, here’s one feel-good story. Ten years ago today, over a million people on Twitch participated in a single shared playthrough of Pokémon Red. It was a phenomenon like nothing seen before or since. At the time, I was a young journalist who was extremely excited to score an interview with the creator of Twitch Plays Pokémon—who to this day remains anonymous. For that fun trip down memory lane, check out the piece here: (WIRED)
The Secret Parallel Universe of Women-Led Games
Apocalyptic statistics about the games industry are pretty easy to come by these days, but one of the more ominous figures getting passed around recently is that there were over 14,000 games released on Steam last year.
That’s an average of 40 games coming out every day.
Admittedly, there’s a decent amount of amateurish junk in that count, but there’s also a lot of genuinely interesting stuff dropping daily. It’s increasingly easy to get lost in the shuffle, even if you’re a talented, experienced developer making a game with serious artistic merit.
As a games marketer, this is kind of a nightmare. I hate nothing more than finding a Steam page for a really beautiful, high-effort game that only has a few reviews. It breaks my heart, man.
Like, earlier this week I bought this game FROGUE (made by Brazilian solo dev Thiago Oliveira) and it absolutely rules. It’s a turn-based roguelite platformer where time freezes in between each move you make—really unique, and cool!
But as of right now FROGUE has only 16 reviews, and one of the reviewers is me.
Look, here’s a trailer for the game:
Maybe this isn’t your thing—you look at it and think whatever, roguewhat? But I promise you, there is an audience for this game. They just haven’t discovered it yet. This game, if discovered, could make a million players happy.
FROGUE is up against one of the biggest problems facing smaller game developers in 2024: how to get discovered. I’m not pointing out anything new here. Simon Carless from GameDiscoverCo writes knowledgeably about this problem every single week.
So you can read hundreds of posts about the game discovery problem (and if you want to release your own game, you absolutely should). But the overriding takeaway is this: With ~40 games coming out every day, it’s no longer good enough to just “make a good game.” Developers have to get creative if they want their games to be discovered by players.
And one way to try to fix it is by banding together with likeminded creatives.
So I was extremely interested to learn recently about an international coalition of women-led games studios banding together to promote each other’s games.
The Ladies Gang Up
About a month ago, I had an hourlong conversation with Charmaine “Char” Duff, the founder of Women-Led Games, an annual showcase for (you guessed it) games by women-led and majority women studios.
By the end of that hour I was feeling kind of mortified, because Char had introduced me to at least 10 amazing-looking games which I had never heard of before.
Over and over again, I was baffled as Char namedropped titles like darkwebSTREAMER—an upcoming horror game about being a Twitch-style streamer on an alternate-history 1990s internet infested by demons—and Sticky Business, a game about selling stickers which has over 3,000 overwhelmingly positive reviews on Steam.
The more I talked to Char, the more I felt like I’d shifted into an alternate timeline. What are these games? Why aren’t more people talking about them?
I started wishlisting and playing demos for a bunch of the games featured in last year’s Women-Led Games event and reaching out to their creators.
I wanted to know: How important are things like the WLG showcase?
Chantal Ryan, the lead developer of darkwebSTREAMER, is one of the more well-known developers to be featured in last year’s WLG showcase. The Australian developer has been a headline speaker at conventions like South By Southwest, and I’ve starting seeing up her popping up more and more as the release of her terrifying-looking game draws nearer.
Ultimately, Ryan says, she believes the success is mostly determined by the quality of her game. “I'm a ‘build it well and they will come’ kind of person,” she says.
But, of course, Ryan also has a detailed go-to-market plan focused on getting media features, networking with streamers who seem like a good fit for the game, and hosting in-person events with demos. Every bit of promotion helps. And this is where things like the Char’s Women-Led Games showcase come in.
“The Steam algorithm is the sword of Damocles that hangs above every PC game's head,” says Ryan, “so showcases, and particularly Steam-focused shows/festivals, provide wonderful oases in the desert of visibility and engagement, allowing us to get our exposure up and work the algorithms in our favor for brief moments in time. The more of these we can get, the more players we can find, the happier everyone is!”
Laure De Mey, the lead on Botany Manor, agrees. “Most game showcases are still heavily dominated by men-targeted games,” she says, “and if we can create a space where women can feel validated and seen, that is a massive positive.”
The good news, says De Mey, is that there are some advantages working in the favor of games like Botany Manor. Online communities like r/CozyGamers, De Mey says, “have made a massive mark in the industry, making it easier for women to recommend and share games with each other.” De Mey also namedrops content creators like Gab Smolders and Cozy K as leaders who are helping women game devs get their games discovered.
“I believe it will only get bigger,” De Mey says.
A Brief Aside: Steam Steps Up
Just as I was getting ready to send this email out, I popped into Steam and noticed that Valve is kicking off March with their own Women’s Day Sale, sponsored by the investor group at the WINGS fund.
Again, I feel like I’ve entered an alternate timeline—I’ve never heard of many of these games and a lot of them look pretty sick. Like, what the hell is this:
Yeah, I wanna be a frog detective on a scooter. Yes, I will answer the Call of the Sea. Hell yeah, I wanna play whatever this is.
Go check out the sale. There’s good stuff in there, and, by the way, the sale’s organizer, WINGS, is also a sponsor of Char’s Women-Led Games event.
WINGS CEO Eliana Oikawa told me in an emailed comment that “We are especially proud to support the Women-led Games event as this amazing community came together as a result of the cancellation of last year's Women's Day Sale.”
Compared to the 2022 version of the sale, Oikawa says, “We received double the number of game submissions and expect developers to see a high increase in their sales and wishlists during the event.”
You love to see it.
We Are Never Stopping Critter Cropping
WLG’s Char got her start in games as the community manager on Skyreach Studio’s Critter Crops, an upcoming hand-drawn-looking game that combines farming and monster-collection mechanics.
Char credits Skyreach’s founder, Crystal Sciarrino, with giving her a foothold in the industry. “Without Crystal offering a helping hand and supporting a stranger, a fellow woman, in her dreams, Women-Led Games would not exist,” Char says.
I reached out to Sciarrino and asked her whether she feels like her team has good ways of reaching female players, and her response challenged the assumptions implicit in my question. “I think that this industry tries too hard to put labels on people based on irrelevant information,” Sciarrino says. “So I personally strive to appeal to who people are in a social sense and remove the other factors.”
Sciarrino says that she’s noticed with Critter Crops, her community tends to be split pretty evenly along gender lines, despite some saying that the game is “for girls.” For that reason, she wants to make sure she’s not making too many assumptions about how to label her game’s players. “This is of course because we want everyone to feel included but this also helps a small team like ours maximize our reach.”
In other words, solving the discovery problem for women-led games isn’t just about reaching more women players—but anybody that vibes with the games these teams are making.
That’s where the Women-Led Games Showcase and events like it come in, says Sciarrino, by giving people “a curated one stop shop to not only games that tend to be less 'explody' and more tender and thought-out, but also provides a forum for women to support and idolize awesome devs who are like them.”
More Underrated Women-Led Games
I asked Char for some recommendations for more slept-on and underrated games by women devs. Her callouts:
Love, Ghostie is an adorably funny matchmaking sim where you play as a ghost that leaves gifts to the residents of a mansion in hopes to create relationships between them. The writing is hilarious and had me giggling like a child every 30 seconds.
If you're into more spooky games, Scarlett Hollow—by the same developers of Slay the Princess—is a great one.
If you're into farming sims, but are tired of the same loop as other farming sims, I highly recommend checking out Grimoire Groves, SunnySide, and Critter Crops.
And if you're into more narrative games that tackle things like mental health or the challenges that women face, Finding Hannah and Insomnia are both great titles to get immersed in.
Ultimately, Char says, the point of all this is to “inspire and uplift women inside and outside of the industry to jump in and create games they want to see.”
The next WLG showcase is a three-day Twitch and YouTube livestream event scheduled to run from March 8th-10th between 5:00pm–6:00pm EST each day. It’ll have new game announcements, trailers, and interviews with developers and content creators.
My takeaway: we need to see more of this stuff in games. A lot of game developers—even indies—talk about other studios in the industry as “competitors,” which really only makes sense in certain contexts. If you’re shipping a hyper-realistic basketball game and trying to take down NBA 2K, yeah, that’s a competition. Go get ‘em, tiger. (And good luck, lol.)
Both for most of us? It’s really not that serious. Maybe we could all learn from these women and find some ways to help each other out more.
That’s all I’ve got today. I’m gonna go open up my Steam Discovery Queue and download fifteen games about shooting dudes in the face.
See you next Friday.
I love what Charmaine is doing. My wife is great at finding hidden gems on Steam, but she's always baffled at the lack of reviews. Excited to see Charmaine's impact on giving good games (and developers) their proper bit of spotlight.
"I reached out to Sciarrino and asked her whether she feels like her team has good ways of reaching female players, and her response challenged the assumptions implicit in my question. “I think that this industry tries too hard to put labels on people based on irrelevant information,” Sciarrino says. “So I personally strive to appeal to who people are in a social sense and remove the other factors.”"
This is a really fascinating point, and one I'd not given much thought.
We use player personas (I'm sure you do too), but *still* think about things like age/gender demographics in our work. I'm not suggesting we abandon it all for "vibes based marketing" - but there's definitely something to be said about thinking about the kind of people who will "vibe" with your game, regardless of their demographic.