We at Lawyer.se work with many incredible clients doing amazing things in the world of videogames. One of them is Wings, a Scandinavian funding organization with a global reach. Established in 2018 by Audrey Leprince and Petter Henriksson, Wings supports videogames created by teams led by women and other marginalized gender developers.
”We’re missing out on huge market potential that the videogame industry is so dominated by just one gender,” said Astrid Refstrup, lead of developer relations and business development at Wings. ”So, focusing on diversity is very important if we want to make the industry even more profitable.”
Wings helps studios finance specific projects, meaning it doesn’t acquire equity in the studio. This is mutually beneficial, Refstrup explained. Simply buying a stake in a studio may not lead to profit right away unless the studio scales quickly. This, she said, gives the investor less flexibility on who to work with, as only studios looking to grow rapidly would provide a quick return on investment. By focusing their efforts on specific projects, Wings can support studios no matter how fast they want to grow.
For the studios Wings invests in, this model of project financing means greater autonomy. A publisher will have more influence over the project and often take a sizable portion of the revenue from a game. Project financing, Refstrup said, provides funds and advice, but it’s up to the studio how it wants to use the money it receives.
This model, according to Refstrup, also makes the industry more equitable.
”If you work with a publisher, a lot of the knowledge will be with the publisher. But if you’re working with project financing, you will have to gain that knowledge yourself,” she said. ”So, it’s not only bridging the funding gap, it’s also bridging the knowledge gap in the industry.”
As we have written about in the past, some signs point toward a more gender-equitable future for the industry — at least in some countries — but the road to get there is still long. Refstrup, who began her career in videogames nine years ago when she started her own studio, explained the issues that plagued her experience as a woman founder — negative stereotypes, harassment — are still far too common.
”When I’m connecting with younger women founders just starting out, they’re having exactly the same experiences as I had. So I don’t know if it’s better.”
However, she noted that people discuss gender issues and equality more than they used to.
”I will say, talking about diversity, focusing on diversity and doing the work that we’re doing at Wings, it has become more globally accepted,” Refstrup said. When she began using her pronouns, for example, that was far from common practice. ”Now, you can definitely be in a panel where everybody does that automatically and no one would lift an eyebrow.”
Working with founders across the globe, Refstrup sees women and gender-marginalized people challenge societal and cultural norms.
”I’ve met people all over the world creating very diverse games, focusing on queer culture and critique of their society and the country they’re living in and so on. And their living situations can be very, very different, but all over the world, there are very cool female and gender marginalized founders trying to change the industry.”
Through nearly a decade of experience, first as a founder and then working with other founders in her role at Wings, Refstrup has learned some valuable lessons.
”I see a lot of minority studios wanting to do it all. They want to be inclusive. They want to be diverse. They want to have the most healthy workplace culture, the best salaries, the best work-life balance, the most accessibility features in their games. They are so focused on this that sometimes I’m like, ’Hey, you are three or four people, and you are fighting just to have money to do your game; it’s okay that your gender balance isn’t fifty-fifty,'” she said. Focus on making your game, first and foremost, she recommends instead. ”It’s okay sometimes to ask for the big changes to come from the big corporations and the big money.”
The same goes for the players, too.
”Understand this and give a little bit more room for those people just starting out because if they are successful and they have that focus, hopefully, they’re going to build big corporations one day that can include these things as well.