Sara Veal’s framework for a more sustainable and supportive games industry

Last week, Games London revealed this year’s cohort for its Ensemble initiative. Now in its eighth year, the exhibition features underrepresented games creatives in the UK, showcasing their achievements and personal journeys.

Curated by author and artistic director Sharna Jackson, the 2026 cohort features a variety of professions from development, narrative design, and consultancy roles.

Sara Veal, chair of GamesAid and founder of consultancy firm Huhbub, is among this year’s cohort. Her work centers on people and culture strategy, community engagement, and culture production.

She is also a mentor, having contributed to the Limit Break mentorship program, which is also in its eighth year, Into Games, and Code Coven’s inaugural Aurora accelerator. We spoke to its CEO and founder Tara Mustapha last year as part of 2025’s Ensemble initiative.

Veal is active across the UK game sector, which is by design. “It keeps me closely connected to people entering and navigating the industry,” she tells GamesIndustry.biz.

“Whether I’m producing transmedia events, working on people infrastructure or thinking about how a charity can best mobilise the industry’s generosity, I’m asking the same question: how do we build things that last and actually sustain people?”

Translating these principles into action, Veal focuses on developing and implementing wellbeing initiatives to help developers maintain a sustainable workplace.

“Game development is a creative, high-pressure, deadline-driven environment. The conditions that make games exciting to work on, such as ambitious scope, talented teams, and high standards, are exactly the conditions that can burn people out when not balanced with intentional support. A studio that doesn’t invest in its people’s mental health is borrowing against its future.”

“The biggest challenge in building that culture is the tension between passion and exploitation. Games attract people who love what they do, and that passion can be leveraged against them. Industry instability heightens this. People accept less than they deserve because they don’t think there are other options.”

To address this, Veal advises studios to actively listen to their developers before starting a project.

“The biggest mistake is implementing programmes that look good on paper but don’t reflect what the team needs”

“The biggest mistake is implementing programmes that look good on paper but don’t reflect what the team needs. Survey your people, engage with the results, and show that you have. Find out where the stress lives. Is it crunch? Unclear communication from leadership? Financial anxiety? Lack of autonomy? The answer shapes the intervention. Then make sure whatever you put in place is accessible, not just technically available.”

For smaller studios with limited resources, Veal notes that “culture is often more powerful than programmes” and can be “healthier than one with a meditation app subscription and virtual socials that everyone is too overloaded to attend or enjoy.”

Veal emphasises the importance of clearly signposting free and affordable resources, integrating rest periods into the production schedule, and ensuring leaders visibly model healthy behaviours such as leaving work at a reasonable time, taking leave, and speaking openly about stress.

“Leadership behaviour tells people what’s actually valued, regardless of what the employee handbook says. If people at the top work 80-hour weeks, treat crunch as a badge of honour, or dismiss mental health conversations as “soft,” no programme will overcome that signal. Culture flows downward. Leadership behaviour is policy.”

“Leadership behaviour tells people what’s actually valued, regardless of what the employee handbook says”

“Beyond formal initiatives, everyday habits matter enormously: normalising honest conversations about workload in team settings and one-to-ones; celebrating sustainable delivery, not just heroic effort; making sure people use their leave; adding opportunities for meaningful social connection not as productivity theatre but because relationships are protective. Many mental health issues are actually structural problems in disguise. Getting the basics of good employment right is the most underrated wellbeing intervention there is.”

Studios can measure the effectiveness of these initiatives using both quantitative and qualitative methods, Veal says. The former includes sickness absence rates, use of employee assistance programs, staff turnover, and engagement survey trends. For the latter, studios should observe whether employees discuss their feelings openly, whether managers have meaningful conversations beyond performance reviews, and whether staff feel safe to raise concerns early.

“Sometimes a sign that wellbeing is working looks like friction at first,” says Veal. “Employees feeling safe enough to speak up and advocate for themselves in ways they weren’t able to before – hat’s a good sign, even if it feels like a challenge to leadership. I’m wary of wellbeing metrics becoming performative; studios tracking ‘wellbeing scores’ as a KPI without doing the harder work of cultural change. The number isn’t the point. The lived experience is.”

“Sometimes a sign that wellbeing is working looks like friction at first”

Amid ongoing layoffs and economic uncertainty, Veal advises companies to communicate “early and honestly” with their employees.

“The anxiety of uncertainty, such as not knowing if your role is safe or not, or not understanding why decisions are being made, is often more damaging than the difficult news itself. Leaders who are transparent, even when they don’t have all the answers, foster more resilience in their teams than those who manage by information control. When redundancies do happen, treat people with dignity. A good exit process, including fair severance, outplacement support, honest references, and a genuine goodbye, matters enormously. How a company behaves at its worst is what people remember and talk about.”

Veal also highlights that well-being support is often among the first resources cut during a crisis, despite its importance.

“The instinct to strip back ‘non-essentials’ during a downturn often targets exactly the things that would help people through it. Mental health support, open communication, and clear processes are load-bearing structures, not decorations. The layoffs of the last few years have left real wounds in this industry. We’re not going to rebuild trust by pretending they didn’t happen. We rebuild it by doing better by treating people as the primary asset they actually are.”

These values have also informed her broader work in the industry. Since joining GamesAid in 2022 as a trustee — later serving as vice chair – Veal has championed the game industry’s generosity in creating lasting benefits for children and young people.

In 2023/24, GamesAid donated £150,000 to its selected charities, raising its total contributions to over £6.23 million. The organisation has supported 21 charities, many of which receive recurring support.

“Sustaining and growing that figure during significant industry turbulence such as widespread layoffs, studio closures, and economic pressure on individuals is fantastic. It would have been easy for charitable giving to fall away. It did not because this industry cares, and our team has been incredible at engaging the industry throughout.”

“It would have been easy for charitable giving to fall away during the downturn. It did not because this industry cares”

“When you think about what a £20,000 donation means to an organisation with a turnover of less than £2.5 million, it’s significant. It might fund a research project, equip a young person with mobility aids that change their independence, or make a wish come true for a child who’s running out of time. The games industry should be very proud of this.”

Beyond fundraising, Veal is most proud of the team’s growth since she became chair, and values the “incredible range of past and present trustees I’ve had the privilege of working alongside.”

“Being part of GamesAid has helped me understand the industry so much more than if I were only working at studios themselves. The organisation feels more resilient than when I came in, thanks to the collective efforts of the team, trustees and our supporters, and that matters for longevity.”

Veal notes that as a small charity, GamesAid continues to face significant challenges.

“We can’t compete for attention with larger organisations on marketing spend or manpower,” she emphasises. “We rely on the industry telling our story, and I’ve been working with the team to make it easier for people to do that by finding more ways for individuals to get involved beyond donating. The industry is going through a painful period. When people worry about their job security, charitable giving can feel like a luxury. Our response has to show that GamesAid is not just a nice-to-have. It speaks to the heart of this industry. The games community has always been generous – that’s worth protecting.”