What We Mean When We Talk About Sustainability

A few weeks ago I finished designing and facilitating a masterclass for the GameSkills programme, supported by Creative Europe. Not long after, some feedback landed in my inbox that gave me one of those small, clarifying jolts. It's shaped the conversations I've had since, and it's already shaping the slides I'm building for the next engagements.

Not because it was negative. It wasn't, particularly. It stayed with me because it named something I hadn't fully seen while I was still standing in the room.

Most of the people in that room had arrived expecting a different session.

They'd read sustainability in games marketing and pictured, reasonably, a toolkit — something to save time, money, resources, where marketing and community building were concerned. Case studies. Frameworks they could lift and carry back to their desks on Monday. That's a real topic, and a real workshop, and one I can absolutely deliver another time. It just wasn't this one.

What I'd actually built was something closer to a question than an answer: not how do we make marketing more sustainable, but what does it actually mean to market "sustainability" — the content, the initiatives, the partnerships, the ideas — in video games.

A masterclass, not a lecture. The room's experience was meant to matter as much as mine.

Neither expectation was wrong. They were just standing on different sides of the same word — and I don't think anyone in the room, myself included, clocked that until we were already an hour in.

Which, looking back, might be one of the real insights. Not about sustainability. About language.

Some words feel self-explanatory right up until you ask a full room what they mean, and get eleven different rooms back. Leadership. Purpose. Impact. Community. Sustainability. We use them like shared ground and then discover, usually mid-conversation, that we were never quite standing on the same patch of it.

Sustainability carries more of this than most. It's not just a word people define differently in a workshop — it's politicised, commercialised, and worn thin by everyone's justified suspicion of greenwashing. Half the conversation happening about it right now, in games and well beyond, is really a conversation about how to avoid sounding like you're faking it. That's a heavier thing to walk into a room with than a leadership away-day ever is.

Since then, similar questions have kept surfacing, in completely different settings — with developers, founders, marketers, studio leads, students, people scattered across different countries and different stages of the same tired industry. What kept surfacing wasn't confusion exactly. It was closer to a low hum underneath everything: people who genuinely wanted their work to mean something, who cared about culture and community and where this whole industry is actually headed — and who were, at the same time, exhausted. Trying to keep a studio breathing. Trying to hold onto what mattered to them while the ground kept shifting under the day job.

In a month I'll bring a short version of this to Gamescom Dev. I still don't know what that room will want from it — but I've at least tried to clarify the title this time, calling it Marketing Positive Impact in Games instead.

What surprised me wasn't the misunderstanding around the language, or the tiredness, or even how little most people knew about what already exists in this industry. It was how many of them believed they had no power or agency in any of it to begin with.

There's a real body of work in this industry already — on sustainability, climate, accessibility, wellbeing, community, positive impact. People have been quietly building this for years, sharing what they learn, making tools accessible to the broader industry. And somehow, for most of the people I was talking to, none of it had reached them. Not from lack of curiosity. It just hadn't travelled.

Which makes me suspicious of the story we tell ourselves about innovation — that the next breakthrough has to be something entirely new. Sometimes the actual work is smaller and less glamorous than that. Helping good ideas find their way to the people who need them. Helping people find each other. Building the room where what already exists can finally be said out loud, questioned, built on.

The longer I do this, the less I think ASTERA is here to arrive with answers. It's closer to: help a conversation happen that wouldn't otherwise. Notice the people working toward the same thing without knowing the other exists. Hold perspectives that have been developing in parallel long enough for them to actually meet.

I keep doing this less because I enjoy the unpredictability of it and more because it feels necessary — these conversations aren't happening enough elsewhere, and someone has to keep opening the room, wrong title and all.

If I believe anything at this point, it's that real change doesn't start with certainty. It starts with getting curious enough to notice that someone else has been looking at the same landscape from a completely different path the whole time.

I don't think it's my job to convince them to walk mine. Just to help us notice where the paths were already about to cross.

Gamescom will tell me whether any of this landed. Either way, I'm bringing more slides with clear industry examples this time. Turns out enlightenment has a slide-count.