The Women-Led Games Showcase is returning for its second year from March 8th to 10th.

Organized by the Women-Led Games group, the fully digital event aims to spotlight games from a variety of women-led and women-majority teams. The showcase is sponsored by veteran indie games publisher Devolver Digital (Hotline Miami, The Messenger), women and gender-marginalized games funding group WINGS Interactive and developer Big Blue Sky Games (Merchants of Rosewall).

On the first day, which also coincides with International Women’s Day, a Nintendo Direct-like presentation featuring trailers and announcements for games will be shown at 5pm ET/2pm PT. In total, 22 videos will be shown, including those from Nerial (Reigns and Card Shark) and Big Blue Sky Games.

The following day is focused on the women creators themselves, promising “insightful discussions, behind-the-scenes look and exclusive interviews” with the likes of Nerial’s Tamara Alliot, RainyGames‘ Sydney Stockdale (SunnySide) and Skyreach Studio‘s Crystal Sciarrino (Critter Crops).

Finally, March 10th is centred around the women content creators who help uplift these kinds of games. This portion of the event will be hosted by KiwiOnTheSticks and feature guests sweetxsage, KleopatrahJones, ChelseaBytes, Knimbly, DontBGelas and YessieXO.

The entire three-day Women-Led Games Showcase will be streamed on Women-Led Games’ Twitch and YouTube channels.

As part of a broader Women’s History Month MobileSyrup SyrupCast interview going live later this month, we spoke to Women-Led Games founder and director Charmaine Duff. She’s also the community manager on Critter Crops and Die Soft‘s Little Nemo and is originally from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan before moving to the U.S. later in her childhood.

During our interview, she explained that she was inspired to create Women-Led Games last year after Valve declined to feature WINGS’ Women’s Day Sale Steam Event. The previous year, the event was “really, really popular,” in part thanks to Valve displaying it prominently on Steam, but the company ultimately opted, for unknown reasons, to not do that in 2023.

“There were just a lot of women that I was talking with and that were really, really disappointed,” Duff notes. “When you don’t have that feature on the Steam front page, the amount of views and publicity and things like that just drops dramatically.”

Seeing how “dejected” women felt, she then decided to start Women-Led Games to give them more of a spotlight.

Even in those early days, Duff had already been envisioning the Women-Led Games Showcase, but it just wasn’t feasible, given she only had a few weeks to turn something around. So instead, she reached out to all of the studios that were going to be in the Steam sale to promote their games on a website and share download codes for them with content creators for further exposure.

“It wasn’t anything huge, but it was something that was still appreciated by the women in the community and they wanted to see more,” she says, noting that this helped pave the way for the full digital showcase this year.

There are several reasons why initiatives like this are important. Overall, nearly 50 percent of all gamers worldwide are women, yet they only account for around 20 percent of developers. Further, the ones who are in the industry face often far more online abuse than their male counterparts simply for being women.

Those are evergreen problems, but Duff notes that 2023 was a particularly “crappy year” for the industry — both due to the widespread layoffs and a particular lack of recognition of women. She specifically cites a special anniversary PC Gamer retrospective, which didn’t name a single woman who contributed to the magazine even as it looked back on three decades.

It also brings to mind a similar controversy earlier in 2023 over the nearly two-hour-long Summer Game Fest showcase that failed to have a single woman on stage. Geoff Keighley, the creator of the show, told CBC that Alan Wake 2 star Melanie Liburd was supposed to be there but had to cancel due to scheduling conflicts, a questionable response that suggested there were somehow no other women who could have been asked instead.

“I’ve had a year to plan it and I wanted to start off with a bang and do something that was really fun and really celebrated women after the crappy year we had last year in general in the game industry and as women,” Duff says.

Alongside the Women-Led Games Showcase, you can also check out WINGS Interactive’s Women’s Day Sale on Steam, which runs from March 1st to 10th and promotes games, demos and discounts from women and gender-marginalized teams. A thread breaking down some of these spotlighted teams and games can also be found here.

Image credit: Women-Led Games


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