See our Updated Commitment to Fighting for Marginalized Devs in the Games Industry (2023)


It is a disappointing truth that the games industry has poor diversity and has a track record of pushing out—or never even accepting—people from marginalized communities. Clever Endeavour Games is committed to encouraging people from these communities into the games industry and supporting the ones who are already there but are vastly underrepresented, unheard, and discriminated against.

We made a statement earlier this year in light of the murder of George Floyd by police and we want to follow that up with a real commitment. We made a donation to several causes in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement (details here), but we realize that one-off donations don't suffice for lasting change, so we wanted to commit to continued action and make it public.

Since we started working on this document, there has also been a new wave of revelations about all sorts of abusive behaviours workers are routinely subjected to in the games industry—especially women and people of marginalized genders. This served as a further incentive to go over our policies and practices to make sure that our studio culture protects employees from suffering abuse or injustice in the context of their work.

This document formalizes our long-term commitment to equality in the games industry and beyond—this involves internal work on our studio and external work like helping organizations which support BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour) individuals, women, members of the LGBTQ+ community, and more. This commitment is as long-term as we can make it for the time being.

Below is a list of our concrete commitments.

Within the Studio

Education

First and foremost, we as a studio commit to educating ourselves about the injustices facing minorities in our industry and elsewhere in society. Both individually and as a company, we want to learn how we can become better at recognizing our role in systems of inequality, and how we can uphold anti-discriminatory values in our culture and in our actions in the world.

This includes reading articles online, reading books, watching videos from Black educators, attending webinars, etc. At the end of this post is a list of some of the resources we've been researching. Note that a lot of these are currently centered on the stories of people of colour due to the events that initially moved us to action, but our list of resources will evolve to include many more voices as we continue educating ourselves on social equality causes in the weeks, months, and years to come. We have scheduled regular internal check-ins to make sure that this learning process remains an ongoing endeavour—we acknowledge that this is a process, not a single event.

Importantly, we will make this education an official part of everyone's role as members of Clever Endeavour, by dedicating work hours to it, making attendance to workshops mandatory, and including key resources in our onboarding process.

This learning will act as a backdrop for everything we do.

Company Policies

We have been reviewing and improving our company policies and documentation on things like hiring practices, employee rights and benefits, inclusion, anti-harassment, and anti-racism. Doing so allowed us to make sure that the studio is liable for upholding high standards in its treatment of workforce, and in making proper reparations should we ever fail.