Introduction

ustwo games is proud to become a B Corp, again :) We first earned our certification as a subsidiary of our parent company ustwo in 2019. Very quickly, our status as a B Corp in the games industry became a critical aspect of who we are and the games we make. So we decided to begin the journey towards certifying ustwo games directly. And in August 2022, we became a certified B Corp as a standalone entity!

While our certification status may have changed slightly, our commitment to the B Corp values remains the same. We are inspired by the framework and best practices that B Corp has developed, and we are always looking for opportunities to lead by example with the games industry.

With that in mind, we happily share this 2022 B Corp Impact Report as both a summary of our accomplishments and of the areas that we need to address in the future.

2022 Impact, and the foundations of our B Corp Certification

As this is our first Impact Report, we want share some of the practices and policies that helped us achieve this certification in 2022…

People

• Member of the Living Wage Foundation

• Annual profit share (up to 15% of profits)

• Socially responsible pension fund

• Six months parental leave for all parents

• [85%] employee engagement survey

Community

• Social impact activations or donations linked to our games

• Led by a woman CEO

• Active participation with industry bodies to promote sustainable growth and good working practices

Governance

• Codified our commitment to all stakeholders in our Articles of Association

• Sharing our monthly financials with our team

• Transparent salary bands for all, including executive level banding

• Annual (voluntary) independent audit

Environment

• Measure our carbon footprint and set targets to reduce it

• Support hybrid and remote working

• Work with our landlord to pursue green initiatives and policies

Customers

• We make award-winning, original art and storytelling in the form of mobile, PC and console games that are impact and values driven — we actively aim to use our platform as game creators as a force for good, by including social impact themes to help activate our communities.

Deep dive into our key impact areas for 2022

People

We are always striving to create an environment where creativity can flourish and our team can grow in their careers. Our people policies earned the most points in our assessment and we will look to deepen this strength even more in the years ahead.

In 2022, we implemented an EMI Option scheme, which allowed us to better align long-term growth of the company with the financial outcomes of our founders and employees. In a similar vein, in the first quarter of 2023 we distributed our annual profit share, meaning all our full time employees received 20%+ of their salaries in a bonus payment.

And while it may not have contributed to our certification, we launched our Juno wellbeing programme that provides every team member the flexibility to make use of wellbeing services and products tailored for their individual requirements. This was an important step in evolving our benefits to be more inclusive and aligned with our hybrid and remote ways of working.

We have also added 10 wellbeing/mental health days for employees to have available throughout the year. Wellbeing and mental health is a priority for us, and we are proud to be a proactive employer in this area. In addition to these changes we have amended our sick leave policy to remove the previous limit to instances throughout the year and offer 25 days of sick leave to support our employees when they need it the most.

In terms of other people-positive policies; in the last year we looked at the improvements we could make to our staff benefits package to be more helpful to our teams in a the new Hybrid ways of working, and to offer more inclusivity so that our benefits were more relevant with the needs of our workforce. We created a new policy to offer more flexibility for our employees, allowing them to request to work from anywhere for one month a year. We made changes to our private medical insurance cover to be more inclusive (changing the underwriting basis from Moratorium — where pre-existing conditions in the last 5 years are excluded from claims for the first 2 years — to medical history disregarded, no such exclusion) and implemented a new travel allowance of up to £500 per year to help with the cost of commuting.

Community

In 2022, we gave back to the games community by sponsoring and participating in Now Play This — London’s leading festival of experimental games, showcasing the very latest in independent game design from across the globe. We supported young game creators as part of the Now Play This game jam, and provided essential coaching in game development disciplines, including design and production.

Separately, we took action to support charities and non profit organisations, donating to War Child as part of the armistice Steam Sale Event, with our total contribution at 40% of profits from the sale of our games Monument Valley 1, Monument Valley 2 and Assemble with Care.

Other charitable donations

• British Red Cross — Donation for the Ukraine Crisis Appeal

• Planned Parenthood Donation

• Donation to Islamic Relief

• Crisis at Christmas — Donation to Crisis — campaigning

• UK Youth — Donation for UK Youth Fund

Most notably, in 2022 we continued to donate a tree for every copy of Alba: A Wildlife Adventure that was sold.

As an evolution of this commitment, we established a new partnership with Eden Reforestation Projects to carry out our tree planting as a Sapling Level Corporate Partner.

In total, we planted 181,958 trees in 2022.

Environmental

Whilst we know that planting trees can be a powerful tool to help tackle Climate Change, we knew that we needed to take big steps to better understand our own Carbon footprint as a business. We began working with Climate Partner to track our emissions, determine a baseline year and then measure our emissions for 2021. We were able to determine that our carbon emissions had reduced by 33.73% since our baseline, and we are committed to implementing further reduction strategies going forward

The combination of tree planting and our ambitious drive to reduce our emissions are key parts of our goal to reach a Net Zero target by 2030.

Governance

The governance section of the B Corp certification assesses how a company is structured and run at the highest level. As part of our initial certification, we changed our Articles of Association to reflect our commitment to consider profit, people and planet on an equal level as we run the business and make decisions.

We will also be opting to undergo an annual financial audit on a voluntary basis. Following our de-merger from the larger ustwo group, ustwo games’ size as a business does not qualify it for a compulsory annual audit. However, we believe that in order to hold ourselves to account and promote operational transparency, we would prefer to continue with the auditing process. This will ensure a consistency in due diligence, transparency and an ability to work in line with our responsibilities as a B Corp.

We are also committed to high levels of internal transparency to promote trust and help keep the leadership team accountable. For example:

- we present our financial results monthly to the whole company, including revenue and cost composition and trends, cash position, project profitability etc.

- we share our salary bands, including exec salary bands, annually

- we run a weekly anonymous Q+A open and visible to all team members

Customers

We are committed to using our platform as game creators to drive social change. In 2022 we used the launch of our latest game Desta: The Memories Between to help promote the importance of youth work in modern society. The youth sector is under considerable pressure as it continues providing these essential services to young people. As such,we became partners with UK Youth at the end of 2022, donating 3% of the game’s profit and providing in kind support over the course of 2023 — including raising organic donations from our community to help us in our mission.

Our current unannounced project in production also embodies these values. It is a game that will be grounded in the same artistic and design principles of the previous titles whilst exploring the themes of climate change, migration, and displacement within communities. We can’t wait to see how it takes shape over the course of 2023 and beyond.

What we’ll do in 2023

We have identified a number of areas where we want to focus our B Corp efforts in 2023.

Make a difference with our UK Youth Partnership — through meaningful activations over the course of 2023, we aim to have made a significant impact by raising awareness of the need to support the essential work of the UK’s youth sector.

Culture Club — We will implement people- and culture-focussed afternoons as part of our evolution of hybrid working. We want to spend more time together collaborating with purpose and with a focus on our company values.

Internships — Partnering with Into Games, we will be offering many more internship opportunities to help underrepresented communities access the games industry this year.

Into Games — This partnership focuses on providing support to make the games industry more accessible, inclusive and open than ever before. And through this partnership we are also looking to offer training to our employees focused on empathetic conversations, roots public speaking workshop, diversity and inclusion workshop and limit break mentorship and allyship. This will help employees to create an inclusive and supportive environment internally.

Women in Games We are absolutely thrilled to be part of the Women in Games Corporate Ambassador programme, which is such an important initiative for women at all levels across our amazing industry. Our goal is always to use business as a force for good, whether that’s fulfilling our remit as a certified B Corp, having a clear EDI mission or creating socially-aware games that draw on the real life experiences of our team. We are committed to supporting Women in Games in its work to build a fairer, gender equal playing field for current and future generations of women working at developers, publishers and service providers across the world.

Safe In Our World — We will be partners of ‘Safe In Our World’ for 2023.. The main goal of Safe In Our World is to create and foster worldwide mental health awareness within the video game industry; to eliminate the stigma surrounding mental health, to make it a natural topic of discussion, and to promote the dialogue surrounding mental health so people are not afraid to reach out for help if they need it.

We are looking to work with all of our partners this year as we aim to increase accessibility to the industry in our local community.

Recruitment and inclusive hiring — This year we are partnering with Studiotypes, a talent partner in the games industry. Studiotypes help scale growing teams with amazing talent, enabling studios to make real and lasting connections with people and realise their dreams for growth. They share our values and focus on diversity and inclusion and are working together to achieve this goal. We also organised a workshop inclusive hiring with Cinzia Musio, an EDI consultant specialised in working in the games industry,covering topics such as discrimination law, unconscious bias, giving candidates the best chance to succeed, and how great interviews should go and the importance of positive action and openness. We are also reviewing our policies and researching new improvements to ensure we have fair, inclusive and effective hiring practices.

Diversity and Inclusion –One of our goals for this year is to continue to create an inclusive and supportive environment internally for our team members. We work together with our internal EDI employee group organising different initiatives for Act of Kindness Day, Pride, Black History Month, accessibility, neurodiversity and more recently International Women’s Day. Equally, employees in the group propose causes and facilitate discussion around how to allocate the company charity budget towards those causes important to us.

We are also renewing our commitment to UKIE’s Raise the Game pledge. We are not only a Raise The Game Partner, but many of our employees and company leadership are involved in different capacities, such as board members, or members of the UKIE’s EDI Steering Group.