The charity’s first Impact Report reveals support for over 70,000 video game industry professionals
Behind every video game we spend hours playing, there’s someone: a person who has gone through sleepless nights full of doubts and worries, accompanied, too often in recent years, by the concrete fear of losing their job. It’s a topic that comes up often when talking about independent development, as we explored in The Hard Life of the Solo Developer, but it touches the entire industry, from the smallest teams to the most structured studios.
2026 confirms itself as another difficult year for the video game sector. The layoffs that have already surpassed 3,000 since the start of the year aren’t just a statistic: they’re people who found themselves, often without warning, outside an industry they had worked in for years. In this scenario, a charity dedicated exclusively to the mental health of those who work in video games carries a weight that goes beyond a simple good initiative.
Safe In Our World, a British charity founded in 2019, has just published its first official Impact Report, a document that tells the story of a year of concrete work supporting developers, publishers, content creators, and gamers. Sarah Sorrell, the charity’s Director, makes this clear from the very first lines: “Individuals and organisations have felt the instability and mounting pressures that threaten jobs, businesses, and livelihoods. We believe no one should be left to face mental health challenges alone.”
A year of concrete numbers
The report tells the story of a year of growth for the charity, which expanded both its reach and its team. The numbers speak for themselves: over 70,000 video game industry employees received free mental health resources, more than 300 companies in the sector received direct support, and over 500,000 people accessed the charity’s information hub. On the training front, Safe In Our World delivered over $450,000 worth of free training, teaching more than 400 professionals about mental health awareness.
200 ambassadors across 15 different countries give this work a voice and global visibility. The latest cohort, the Class of 2026, received sponsorship from The Indie Stone, the studio behind Project Zomboid. They carry the charity’s message around the world through talks, panels, and content, a presence that made itself felt this past year at events like GDC, SXSW, devcom, Develop:Brighton, and gamescom.
Recognition for those who truly make a difference
Among the most significant initiatives of the past year is undoubtedly the Mental Health Star Accreditation, the video game industry’s first certification dedicated entirely to mental health practices in the workplace. It’s a process structured across four stages, far removed from a purely decorative badge to display on a company website: an initial informational stage with free resources, a 30-minute employee survey, an audit conducted by industry experts that produces a report with anonymised feedback, and finally a debrief in which the company receives concrete guidance on what to improve.
The accreditation works for companies of any size, from a small two-person team to an AAA studio, and it delivers value in both directions: for employers, it finally provides a concrete tool to measure team wellbeing, alongside public recognition of the commitment they’ve put in; for job seekers, or simply for those already working in the industry, it becomes a way to identify which companies genuinely take seriously their responsibility to protect the people who work for them. Sky Tunley-Stainton, the charity’s Head of Programmes, describes it as a tool that “helps to ensure accountability in the games industry and highlights the games companies driving positive change in mental health.”
Not just those who make games, but those who play them too
Safe In Our World’s work doesn’t stop at the production side of the industry. One of the most interesting initiatives launched this year is Headspace, a new category developed in partnership with AbleToPlay, a free, community-driven platform that helps gamers with disabilities find titles that are genuinely accessible to their needs.
Headspace draws on input from the charity’s Clinical Advisory Board and lets players filter games according to criteria tied to psychological wellbeing: low-pressure titles for those seeking relaxation, cooperative experiences built to foster social connection, games that explore mental health themes through their narrative, or games that teach self-regulation techniques like grounding or breathing exercises. It offers a different way of thinking about a game catalogue, organised not just by genre or platform but also by the kind of emotional experience a game can offer.
On the online safety front, Safe In Our World renewed its partnership with Ubisoft, first launched in 2023, creating three new Good Game Playbooks aimed at different age groups. A version for kids, calibrated to a 5th-grade reading level, focuses on appropriate behaviour to adopt online. A second version, aimed at teens with a higher reading level, helps young people make informed choices about what games they play, how, and with whom. A guide for parents completes the set, designed to help them understand the risks and dynamics of online communication in gaming contexts. All three resources are available for free in five languages.
The community’s response
The results from the Charity Bundle 2026 prove that support for this cause doesn’t come from companies alone. Organised in partnership with Fanatical, the bundle became the most profitable in the six-year history of the initiative, raising over $263,000 and selling out in just nine days. Twenty-two studios, including Landfall, Wired Productions, and Slitherine, donated their titles for the occasion, and the charity has already earmarked the funds for producing new tools, training, and resources.
Support also comes from major names well beyond the video game world: the charity’s sponsors include BAFTA, Ubisoft, the World Health Organization, Unity, and Google Play, confirming how mental health in video games is moving beyond niche territory to become a shared conversation at an institutional level.
Where things go from here
Reading a report like this ultimately means looking at a snapshot of a year in which countless people chose not to stay silent, and just as many chose to build the tools that made silence no longer the only option. The numbers tell part of the story, but the principle holding them together matters more, the same one that guides us when we gather the voices of the people actually making these games, as we did here: people doing this work, at every level, deserve to be seen and protected, not only when things are going well.
Safe In Our World has already announced its objectives for the next chapter: strengthening its internal foundations, amplifying the work already underway, and developing new partnerships, all while keeping sight of the goal of reaching gamers too, not just the industry. Given the numbers in this first report, it’s a direction that already seems to have the right foundations to keep growing.
