Games for Change is coming to London, 05/02/2026
And VGIM is curating its first UK summit 😎
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VGIM teams up with Games for Change and London Games Festival for a brand new event
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Hello VGIM-ers,
I’ve got exciting news to share with you in the Big Read, which we’ll get to in just a second. But before we get there, I do need to let you know that the next few VGIMs will be a little shorter than usual.
I’ve been called up for jury service. And after successfully dodging it last year (without resorting to Homer Simpson’s preferred tactic for beating it), I must now serve on behalf of our King, country, and its crumbling criminal justice system.
VGIM’s will drop at the usual time for free subscribers and paid Insiders over the next couple of weeks. But they are likely to only contain the big read due to time constraints.
The big announcement - Games for Change is coming to London
Drum roll, please: Last week, I teased that I have been working on something exciting that’s due to take place in April. This week, I’m very happy to be able to tell you all about it.
Summit special: VGIM has teamed up with the London Games Festival and Games for Change, the not-for-profit dedicated to driving the use of games for social impact, to launch a special event. On Wednesday 15th April, 150 people from across the games business, civil society, and the political world will come together for a one-day summit to talk about how games can meaningfully change our world for the better.
Tracks and fields: The event, which is the first Games for Change event to land in the UK, will be split into two content tracks. The first track will be dedicated to talks and panels about how to use games to empower individuals, cultivate healthy communities, build a better world, and create a movement for positive change that has staying power. The second, meanwhile, will consist of focused roundtable discussions and workshops that’ll allow us to dive deeper into specific topics - such as the use of video games within public health, sustainability, diversity and inclusion, for creating safe spaces online, and education - to drive the conversation further. And never fear: there will be some opportunities to do some networking. We know you all like that.
All on board: I’m lucky enough to be in charge of curating the event. But I’m not running it alone. Jude Ower MBE (Planet Play), Deborah Mensah-Bonsu (Supercell), James Delaney (Blockworks), Sarah Ticho (XR Health Alliance), and Phil Stuart (PRELOADED) are all contributing their expertise to the event as members of the advisory board, ensuring the event’s content shines and keeping me to task. I’m also being supported by a crack team of event organisers, including reps from both our partner orgs.
Rationale thinking: There are loads of ways that I would love for you, the VGIM community, to get involved. But before I tell you about all that, I think it’s worth saying why I’ve got involved in all of this (and what I hope we can achieve by coming together on this).
The call to action
Sad times: At the end of the last year, I was feeling a touch glum. I’d wrapped up writing Power Play, but I left that process worried about the future. What had started as a cheery project scribbling about how influential video games are turned pretty dark in ways I didn’t expect. Bad actors were using video games, video game culture, and video game communities to achieve some worrying ends. And I felt like I needed to do something about it.
Seriously good: Around that time, I caught up with Elizabeth Newbury. Liz is one of the leading lights of the games for change movement in the US. She had headed up the Wilson Center’s Serious Games Initiative. After chatting with her and several other people within America’s serious games movement, such as Maria Burns Ortiz and Paul Fischer, it was clear that games across the world are supporting social good. Want to encourage people to make sustainable food choices? Create a game with a compelling story to convince them, of course. Want to inform people about vaccines during the Covid crisis? Tap up the Plague Inc team to help you spread the word. Worried about people not understanding how misinformation works online? Run a game jam that uses the industry’s mastery of mechanics to create explainers that truly engage.
Challenges aplenty: But there’s a problem. Support for games that seek to have a meaningful positive impact on society is patchy. Games that shape the way we think about the world are supported by the commercial games industry (hello, Civ), but the need to return investment naturally limits the kind of projects the sector backs. Public funding could theoretically fill the gap, but support for games in most territories is light, inconsistent, and rarely targeted for cultural or societal purposes (it also, occasionally, gets DOGE’ed). And while change-making developers are spread out across the world, there are few opportunities for them to come together to talk shop, share ideas, and spark the next generation of game-changing experiences.
Get on with it: So, an idea formed. Instead of simply whingeing about the problem, what would happen if I rolled up my sleeves and did something about it? At the end of 2025, with a little help from Liz, I pitched Susanna Pollack’s team at Games for Change and Michael French of London Games Festival fame the idea of pulling together a summit in London. With the help of a proposal drafted in a remarkably chilly Belfast Airport in mid-November, we hammered out an agreement to bring Games for Change to London. And as a result, I believe we’ve got a great opportunity to use the event to tell a much more positive story about the power of play in the UK, Europe, and beyond.
Get involved
Teasing times: What can you expect from the event then? Right now, I can’t say too much while we’re lining up our first speaker and partner announcement for later this month. However, there are some things we can say following lots of chats with our event partners, the advisory board, and our first speakers.
Mission statement: We are looking to capture the spirit of the Games for Change Festival and movement at the event. We want to focus on sharing genuine impact from across a range of fields. We want to inspire game makers to positively impact the world around them, while showing the world around us the true power of games. And we really want the event to be a first step towards something much bigger, turning lots of great work in the UK and Europe into a defined movement.
Three routes to glory: But we can only achieve this with your help. And fortunately, you - yes, you, reading this email - can help us to deliver this glorious game-changing event in London by doing one of the three following actions.
Speak up: First, you can submit a talk, panel, or roundtable idea for the summit. Submissions for talks open today and close on Thursday 26th February (that’s three weeks away). If you want to submit a session, you can use our speaker submission form here. You can also read Games for Change’s guidance on great submissions here, all of which will be relevant for our considerations.
Become a partner: Next, you can help out by partnering with us to ensure the event runs successfully. We have a series of packages available for companies that wish to shape the agenda, support activities on-site, and believe that it is important we share the industry’s positive narrative with the world. If you’d like to talk sponsorship, get in touch with me at george@half-space.consulting.
Tickets, please: And finally, you can help out by buying a pass to the event. The London Games Festival ticketing site has industry tickets to the event selling at £99+VAT per person and a limited concession rate of £69+VAT for people working in not-for-profits, academic institutions, and other relevant settings. You can buy a pass here.
Cheery conclusion: So if you believe that games can build a better world, get involved with Games for Change London. You never know what difference we could make together in April.
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News in brief
Genie out of the bottle?: Video game stocks slid last week after Google unveiled Project Genie, a generative AI tool for creating playable worlds. Unity was hit hardest with a 22% drop in price, but shares of Roblox, CD Projekt Red, and Take-Two also took a pounding. But is Genie really a viable tool for game development? Or is it currently only useful for creating piss-poor recreations of carefully authored game worlds, which require curation to make and actually meet player expectations for fun and quality? Watch footage of the worlds that The Verge has generated with Genie and buy stocks in companies affected by an idiotic dip.
SIC news: In massively dry, but genuinely important, news, the UK Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) framework is introducing dedicated codes to mark businesses working within video games publishing, development, and sectors like esports. The new SIC codes, which are used to classify the type of work a business does for the country’s national company register Companies House, will make it much easier to measure the precise economic impact of video game businesses in the future.
Epstein files latest: Jeffrey Epstein was permanently suspended from Xbox Live “due to harassment, threats, and/or abuse of other players,” according to emails released last week. In an email dated 19th December 2013, Microsoft informed the disgraced billionaire that the ban applied to both its Xbox 360 and Xbox One consoles. Former Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick has also appeared in the Epstein files in a discussion about microtransactions. You can view the correspondence here.
It’s not in the gambling game: Austria’s Supreme Court ruled that loot boxes in EA’s FIFA Ultimate Team (Now known as FC Ultimate Team) do not constitute gambling. The court found that the random allocation of content via Ultimate Team packs did not stop a player from using “their own skills to control the course of the game with a probability for success.” The ruling follows a similar judgment in the Netherlands in 2022, which also ruled that the skill-based nature of the wider game meant that the presence of loot boxes did not turn the game into gambling.
Switched on: The Nintendo Switch has become Nintendo’s best-selling console of all time. In its latest financial results, Video Games Chronicle spotted that the original Switch’s 155.4m unit sales have exceeded the record previously set by the Nintendo DS. The company also revealed that it has sold 1.5 billion Nintendo Switch games to date.
Moving on
Paula Angela Esuadra has been appointed Director, Research and Insights at 2K…Jacek Pudlik and Nic van ‘t Schip have founded a new publisher called Pixel Doors…Mike Wallen has been appointed President of Testronic…Richard Cole has recently been appointed a Senior Lecturer in Digital Futures at the University of Bristol…And Christoph Hartmann has left Amazon Game Studios, which he helmed until late last week…
Jobs ahoy
Sports Interactive has a post open for a Senior Community Manager…Frontier Developments is hiring a Senior Game Writer…Kinetic Games is hunting for a Development Director…Netflix has reopened applications for a Senior Researcher - Consumer Insights, Party Games role in New York…And Sony Interactive Entertainment is hiring a Senior Content Acquisition Manager in San Mateo…
Events and conferences
DICE Summit, Las Vegas - 11th-13th February 2026
Guildford Games Festival, Guildford - 20th February 2026
devcom leadership summit, Lisbon - 24th-26th February 2026
Game Developer Conference, San Francisco - 9th-13th March 2026
PAX East, Boston - 26th-29th March 2026
Games of the week
Dragon Quest VII Reimagined - Remaster of Square Enix’s legendary RPG that has more than a passing resemblance to the Link’s Awakening reboot lands this week.
Nioh 3 - Another entry in the needlessly hard action series, where you blend samurai and ninja skills to kill big monsters.
PUBG: Blindspot - 5v5 tactical shooter set within the PUBG universe entered early access earlier this week.
Before you go…
Some cities would be offended if they found out that their streets had inspired a horror game. But some cities are not like Gero City in Japan’s Gifu Prefecture.
It has appointed Takeshi Masago and Tamami Hiraoka, two voice actors who feature in the Gero City-inspired Silent Hill f, as tourism ambassadors.
Let’s toast the news, which was shared by IGN, with some of Gero City’s Silent Hill sake (which rapidly sold out when it first went on sale).
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