Starting diversity efforts for gaming during college

The games industry has a skills problem. More precisely, it has a retention problem. It’s hard for companies to hang on to talent. Crunch, salary disparity, and burnout, not to mention harassment, are all factors. One issue discussed during the GamesBeat Summit 2022 “Building Diversity and Equity into the Games Industry Through College” panel is about the way we look at diversity.

“I think people can get really stuck on diversity being a single characteristic particularly within the games industry, it’s about women and the lack of women, but I think diversity is much bigger than that, ” says Gina Jackson OBE, founder of GameDev Bootcamps. “The work I do is really to counteract the skills crisis we’re in at the moment where we need more experienced people. We can bring people in from university, and we can bring in people in their twenties, but the people we need, at the moment, are more experienced people.”