GDC 2024: Xbox Releases Gaming for Everyone Product Inclusion Framework for Game Developers

Today was a great day for Team Xbox, as we shared publicly for the first time the Gaming for Everyone Product Inclusion Framework, a set of actionable resources meant to help game developers – and the wider games industry - weave intentionality and inclusion into the products they make, in order to reach a broader set of players worldwide in a meaningful way.

At Xbox, our mission is to deliver the joy and community of gaming to everyone on the planet. For years, we’ve been on a journey to help our teams with the tools and knowledge they need to deliver more inclusive products and games, as we aspire to reach the 3+ billion players on the planet.

In 2015, we formed Gaming for Everyone, our inclusive growth strategy and commitment to bring intentional inclusion through product. We wanted to help more players experience the joy of gaming and saw some early momentum and big wins across Team Xbox—like the Xbox Adaptive Controller, a wireless controller designed for gamers with limited mobility that launched in 2018, as well as Sea of Thieves’ inclusive pirate customizations which allowed players to select characters that most represented themselves across gender, clothing, hair, body type, and more.

We knew driving inclusion through product would be a journey - one we’d continue to learn, iterate and improve upon. As we continued to bring Gaming for Everyone to life, we realized the need to create common language and resources to help make this work more tangible. This became particularly evident when we noticed an uptick of teams wanting to learn more about Gaming for Everyone and how to incorporate it into their own workstreams. We needed a central place for information, resources and support.  

In 2019, we created what is now known as the Gaming for Everyone Product Inclusion Framework. Xbox has been using and evolving this framework internally since then and is thrilled to offer it for anyone to use starting today. The framework focuses on four key areas – or what we call, doorways:

• Approachability, which ensures all players, existing and new, experienced and novice, feel safe and welcome.

• Representation is about reflecting the diversity of the player and creator community, so everyone can feel that they belong.

• Globalization is about making global players feel at home – and ensuring that their experience has local relevance and respect.

• Accessibility is about making games and experiences playable for people with disabilities, and striving to make products accessible by design, from the ground up.

Together, we call these Inclusive Growth Doorways, which are the foundational element to the Product Inclusion Framework. We use the metaphor of doorways because gaming has often been considered a doorway to another world, but for some, those doors have been closed or even locked.

This video explains the Gaming for Everyone Product Inclusion Framework and Inclusive Growth Doorways in more detail:

Using the Gaming for Everyone Product Inclusion Framework

By sharing the Xbox Gaming for Everyone Product Inclusion Framework publicly, we hope this enables more game developers to bring intentionality and inclusion to their products, worldwide.

To help developers get started – and use the Framework in action – we've created a central Resource Hub, accessible via https://aka.ms/ProductInclusion, which includes tangible examples, best practices, case studies and more, for each of our Inclusive Growth Doorways.

It is important to note that the Product Inclusion Framework is not meant to be a checklist or any sort of mandate of what makes an “inclusive game.” Rather, the resources and tools within the framework are designed to be a guide for developers, to help enable them to make an intentional decision to either open or leave a door closed, based on the game experience they’re trying to create. The goal of bringing this level of intentionality into games is to expand player reach and deepen player engagement in a meaningful way. That is going to look different based on different gaming experiences, so this framework was designed with that flexibility in mind.

Considering that gaming is one of the world’s largest and fastest growing form of media today – with 2 in every 5 people in the world playing video games – we hope this inspires everyone to make gaming a place for everyone.

So… What door will you open today?