The Mental Health Toolkit for Game Producers

Known
Issues.

Game production is a job that asks a lot of you. Not just your time and skills, but your capacity to hold other people's stress while quietly managing your own. Producers sit at the intersection of creative ambition, business pressure and human beings, all of which bring their own complexity. This toolkit attempts to declutter that intersection. It won't make you a mental health expert, but it will give you practical ways to bring more sustainable, human-centred habits into the work you're already doing.

01 — Introduction

What is this?

This toolkit is built around one core idea: that mental health in game development is not an individual problem to be solved in your own time. It is a structural one, shaped by how teams are organised, how work is scheduled, and whether people feel safe enough to say when something is wrong. Producers are not the cause of these problems, but they are often in the best position to do something about them.

This toolkit is written for game producers.

Whether you are two months into your first production role at a small indie studio, or ten years in at a AAA team, the pressures this toolkit addresses will be familiar. The scale looks different, but the dynamics rarely do.

You do not need a background in psychology to use this. You just need to be someone who wants to do this part of the job a bit better.

This is not a clinical resource.

Nothing in here is a substitute for professional mental health support, and it is not designed to be. If someone on your team is struggling in ways that go beyond what a workplace conversation can address, the most important thing you can do is help them find the right support. There is a list of resources at the end of this toolkit for exactly that.

Take what is useful.

This toolkit reflects one perspective, informed by research and by conversations with producers, psychologists and people working at the intersection of mental health and games. It was developed as part of Take This's Accelerate Programme.

Take what is useful, adapt what does not quite fit, and leave the rest. This is one starting point.

02 — What even is a game producer?

What even is a game producer?

Ask ten producers what they do and you will get ten different answers. That is not because they are being evasive. It is because the role genuinely resists a clean definition in a way that almost no other role in a studio does. A programmer writes code. An artist makes art. A producer does... whatever needs doing, by whoever is not doing it, in whatever form the project currently requires.

That ambiguity is not a bug in the role. It is more or less the point. Producers exist at the intersection of people, process, and product, and the balance between those three shifts constantly depending on the project, the team, the studio, and the moment. At a small indie studio, a producer might be simultaneously managing the schedule, handling community communications, chasing down a contractor, and doing their own QA pass. At a larger studio, the role might be more clearly scoped, but no less complex: coordinating across disciplines, managing upwards, absorbing the pressure that does not belong to any one department and so lands on the person whose job description is most flexible.

What tends to be consistent, regardless of studio size or seniority, is a set of responsibilities that are structurally oriented outward. The producer's job is to make other people's work possible. That means unblocking, facilitating, communicating, planning, and problem-solving, often simultaneously, often on behalf of people who may not fully understand what that work involves. A production director interviewed for this project, put it plainly:

"If you're successful you are invisible, if things aren't smooth people will start to notice."— AAA Production Director, interviewed for this project

That asymmetry has a cost. It makes it genuinely difficult to build a clear sense of what good looks like in the role. It makes imposter syndrome particularly acute, because the feedback loops that other disciplines rely on, a finished asset, a working feature, a solved bug, are largely absent. And it means that the person most responsible for holding the team together is often the last one anyone thinks to check in on.

The producer role also sits at what one interviewee described as the crossroads of several industries at once. To do the job well, you need a working understanding of creative process, project management, interpersonal dynamics, business constraints, and whatever technical domain your team operates in. None of that is taught in a single place. Most producers piece it together through experience, instinct, and a lot of learning the hard way.

The ambiguity of the role is not going to disappear, and this toolkit is not going to resolve it. But it is worth naming clearly, because that ambiguity is itself one of the things that makes production hard. If you have ever felt unsure whether you are doing your job well, struggled to explain what you actually do to someone outside the industry, or found yourself absorbing stress that does not officially belong to you, you are not experiencing personal failings. You are experiencing the role as it actually exists.

03 — The state of mental health in the games industry

The state of mental health in the games industry

If you have ever felt like you were struggling more than you should be, or that the industry asks more of people than it publicly admits, you are not imagining it. The data backs you up.

Mental health challenges are common across most workplaces. But the games industry has its own numbers worth sitting with.

1 in 4
Adults will experience mental illness at some point in their lifetime.
Safe in Our World →
44%
Of respondents identified as having a mental or physical disability, and 24% as neurodivergent.
IGDA Developer Satisfaction Survey 2023 →
1 in 3
US-based respondents had been laid off in the past two years, and half said their current or most recent employer had conducted layoffs in the past 12 months.
GDC 2026 State of the Game Industry →
28%
Of developers reported their job involved crunch, with a further 25% reporting extended overtime they simply did not call crunch.
IGDA Developer Satisfaction Survey →
59%
Of those who experienced crunch worked more than 50 hours per week. When overwork stops having a name, it also stops being something you feel entitled to push back on.
IGDA Developer Satisfaction Survey →
13%
Of studios provide any training for managers on how to support employee mental health. The gap between the scale of the problem and the structures in place to address it is wide.
State of Game Development 2023 →
"Keeping your employees means keeping them well."— Doctoral Level Therapist specialising in games, interviewed for this project

There is a persistent tendency to treat mental health as an individual responsibility, something to be managed in your own time. But the research points elsewhere. Only 13% of studios provide any training for managers on how to support employee mental health. The gap between the scale of the problem and the structures in place to address it is wide. That is what this toolkit is built around. Not tips for surviving a bad system, but practical ways to make the system a little less bad, starting with the production decisions that are already in your hands.

04 — Mental health concepts game producers face

Mental health concepts game producers face

The concepts in this section came directly from conversations with producers. They are not a clinical checklist, and this is not an exhaustive list of everything that can affect mental health at work. They are simply the themes that came up again and again, across studios of different sizes, in different roles, at different points in people's careers.

Burnout is one of those words that gets used so often it starts to lose its edges. It is worth being precise about what it actually means, because burnout is not the same as tiredness, stress, or having a bad week. It is a distinct state that develops over time, and it requires more than a good night's sleep to recover from.

The World Health Organisation classifies burnout as an occupational phenomenon characterised by three things: a feeling of energy depletion or exhaustion, increased mental distance from your job, and reduced professional efficacy. In plain terms: you are running on empty, you have stopped caring, and the work that used to feel meaningful has started to feel pointless.

In game development, burnout tends to build slowly and get noticed late. The culture of passion and commitment that draws many people to the industry can make it hard to identify where dedication ends and depletion begins. People often describe only realising they were burnt out in retrospect, after the project shipped or after they left a studio.

The conditions that lead there are well documented: 28% of developers reported their job involved crunch, with a further 25% reporting extended overtime they simply did not call crunch, and of those who experienced crunch, 59% worked more than 50 hours per week. When overwork stops having a name, it also stops being something you feel entitled to push back on.

Recovery takes time. Research suggests a minimum of three to six months, and that is with meaningful changes to the conditions that caused it. Burnout does not resolve itself by pushing through.

"People in the industry are trained to sustain symptoms of overwork, and to not respect their limits."— PhD researcher studying crunch, interviewed for this project

Take This: Burnout 101 →

Imposter syndrome is the persistent feeling that you are not as competent as others perceive you to be, and that at some point, someone is going to find out. It is remarkably common, and it is particularly acute in the producer role.

Part of what makes production so vulnerable to imposter syndrome is that the job is genuinely hard to define. Success often looks like nothing happening: no fires, no blocked teams, no missed milestones. When things are going well, the producer's contribution can be invisible. When things go wrong, it is visible immediately. That asymmetry makes it very difficult to build a clear sense of what good looks like, and makes it easy to feel like you are always one bad sprint away from being found out.

It is also worth naming that imposter syndrome does not affect everyone equally. Research consistently shows it hits harder for people from underrepresented groups, where the additional pressure of feeling like you do not quite belong can amplify the feeling of inadequacy.

Safe in Our World: Imposter syndrome →

The games industry has never been the most stable of careers, but recent years have made that instability harder to ignore. Widespread layoffs, studio closures, and project cancellations have left many developers in a state of chronic low-level anxiety about what comes next, even when their current position feels secure.

This kind of background uncertainty has a real mental health cost. It affects how safe people feel speaking up, how much creative risk they are willing to take, and how present they can be in their day-to-day work. It also tends to be invisible in the way that diffuse, ongoing stressors often are. There is no single moment of crisis, so it rarely gets addressed directly.

The scale is difficult to ignore: according to the GDC 2026 State of the Game Industry report, over one in four respondents had been laid off in the past two years, rising to one in three for those based in the United States, and half said their current or most recent employer had conducted layoffs in the past 12 months.

For producers, instability carries an additional dimension. The role is often one of the first to absorb organisational pressure, and one of the last to have someone absorbing that pressure on its behalf.

Safe in Our World: Redundancy support →

Safe in Our World: Money and mental health →

Take This: Layoffs →

05 — Three pillars of mental health-friendly production

Three pillars of mental health-friendly production

The concepts in the previous section are things that happen to people. The pillars in this section are things you can actually do something about. They are not a methodology or a framework to implement wholesale. They are three orientations that, in my experience and in the conversations that shaped this toolkit, tend to make the biggest difference to how a team feels over the course of a project. You do not need to adopt all of them at once. Start where it feels most relevant.

Pillar one
Sustainability over urgency

There is a version of game production that runs on adrenaline. Tight deadlines, heroic effort, the team pulling together to ship. It can feel energising in the short term, and it often produces results. The problem is that it is not repeatable. Teams that operate in a constant state of urgency do not just get tired; they lose the ability to pace themselves at all. The baseline shifts, and what used to feel like a sprint starts to feel like the normal speed of work.

Sustainable production is not about working less. It is about working in a way that does not require the team to keep borrowing from their future selves to get through the present week. That means building rest into schedules rather than hoping it happens naturally, accounting for the fact that people's energy levels fluctuate, and treating predictability as something worth protecting rather than something that gets sacrificed whenever the project needs it.

The producer is one of the few people in a team with the structural ability to shape how work is paced. That is not a small thing.

Build buffers into your milestones deliberately, not as a last resort. A schedule with no slack is a schedule that requires crunch the moment anything goes wrong, and something always goes wrong.

When planning sprint capacity, account for energy, not just hours. A team coming off a crunch period, navigating personal stress, or adjusting to new members does not have the same output as a team at full capacity. Treating everyone as interchangeable units of productivity is a planning error, not just a cultural one.

When you find yourself defaulting to urgency as a motivational tool, notice it. Urgency works, but it has a cost, and that cost accumulates quietly. Used constantly, it stops motivating and starts numbing.

Producers tend to be pulled in many directions across a working day, and so do the people they work with. If focus time is not scheduled explicitly, it will not happen. Encourage your team to block it out, and model it yourself.

Set up recurring 1:1s with a fixed structure rather than ad hoc catch-ups. A short weekly conversation where the first question is always "how are you doing" rather than "what is the status" creates a reliable space for people to flag problems early, before they become crises. The consistency matters as much as the content.

Pillar two
The democratic workplace
"The most impactful things for team health is teams that feel like they can be honest with each other — up, down, horizontal — and feeling valued."— Lecturer of Psychology, interviewed for this project

Psychological safety is a term that gets thrown around a lot in workplace conversations, but what it actually means is simple: people feel safe enough to speak up without fear of embarrassment, punishment, or being ignored. In a game studio, that translates to whether someone can say they are struggling with their workload, disagree with a creative decision, or flag that something is not working, without worrying about the consequences.

This matters for mental health in a direct and practical way. People do not burn out in silence because they enjoy suffering. They do so because the environment has not made it safe to say something earlier. By the time a producer notices a problem, it has usually been visible to the person experiencing it for a long time.

Building a more democratic workplace does not require a restructure or a new HR policy. It requires a consistent set of behaviours from the people with the most influence over how the team operates. As a producer, that is often you.

It also means accounting for the fact that your team is not a uniform group. Neurodivergent team members, people from different cultural backgrounds, and those from marginalised groups may have different communication styles, different thresholds for what feels safe to say, and different experiences of what "speaking up" has cost them in the past. A workplace that is only safe for the most confident voices in the room is not actually safe.

When someone raises a concern, a blocker, or a disagreement, your first job is to hear it, not resolve it or explain it away. Teams learn very quickly whether speaking up leads to a genuine response or a polite dismissal. If people sense the latter, they stop trying.

Not everyone processes information or expresses discomfort in the same way. Build space into meetings and check-ins for people who do not respond well to being put on the spot. Asynchronous check-ins, written retrospectives, or anonymous feedback options can open channels that verbal-only formats close.

If there is pressure on the team, say so. If a milestone is at risk, say so. If a decision was made above you that you disagree with but are carrying forward anyway, you can say that too. Transparency about the reality of the situation reduces the anxiety that comes from people filling in the gaps themselves, which they always do, and rarely optimistically.

Your job is not to be your team's therapist, and this toolkit is not asking you to be. But acknowledging that people have lives outside of work, that those lives affect how they show up, and that this is normal and human, costs very little and signals a great deal.

Feedback and check-ins land differently depending on who is giving them. As a producer, you carry more positional authority than you may realise, particularly with junior team members. What feels like an open question to you can feel like an evaluation to someone else. Being aware of that gap, and actively working to reduce it, is part of creating a space where people feel genuinely able to be honest.

Pillar three
Continuous reflection

The first two pillars are largely about how you structure work and how you communicate with your team. This one is about you.

Producers are often the last person in the room to be asked how they are doing. The role is oriented outward by design: unblocking others, absorbing pressure, keeping things moving. That orientation is part of what makes a good producer good. It is also part of what makes the role quietly unsustainable if it is never balanced with any equivalent attention turned inward.

Continuous reflection does not mean constant self-analysis or keeping a journal if that is not how you work. It means building in enough pause to notice when things are shifting, for yourself and for your team, before those shifts become problems. It means being willing to question your own assumptions about what good production looks like, what you expect of yourself, and whether the standards you hold yourself to are ones you would apply to anyone else on your team.

It also means being open to feedback, not just the kind that comes through formal processes, but the informal signals your team sends about what is and is not working. The producer who can hear difficult feedback without becoming defensive is not just easier to work with. They are building the same culture of openness that pillar two asks them to create for others.

This is also the pillar most relevant to your own mental health. The interviews that shaped this toolkit surfaced a consistent pattern: producers tend to apply far more compassion to their team members than to themselves. They would never expect a colleague to work through a period of burnout without acknowledgement, and yet they routinely do it themselves.

Challenge your own assumptions about mental health, which you are doing right now.

Treat retrospectives and post-mortems as team health checkpoints, not just efficiency reviews.

It is OK to focus on yourself. It is OK to disconnect. Producers who model self-care make it safer for their teams to do the same.

06 — Knowing your limits

Knowing your limits: ethical boundaries and referral

"Know when to refer out. Stay in your lane. Have a list of resources at the ready."— Doctoral Level Therapist specialising in games, interviewed for this project

One of the most important things this toolkit can tell you is also one of the simplest: knowing what is not your job is just as important as knowing what is. Producers who try to be everything to their team, manager, advocate, and therapist, are not just overextending themselves. They are also, in practice, providing a worse version of the support their team actually needs.

The ethical boundary is not about caring less. It is about caring clearly. You can be deeply invested in your team's wellbeing and still recognise that some of what they need sits outside your role, and outside your ability to provide safely.

What is in your lane

  • Noticing when someone's behaviour or output changes, and checking in with them
  • Creating conditions where people feel safe to raise concerns early
  • Making practical accommodations where you have the ability to do so, adjusting workload, shifting deadlines, offering flexibility
  • Having a list of relevant resources and signposting people toward them when appropriate
  • Knowing who in your organisation to contact if you are concerned about someone, and doing it

What is not in your lane

  • Diagnosing, treating, or providing ongoing emotional support beyond what a colleague would reasonably offer
  • Engaging in extended conversations that are primarily about someone's feelings rather than their work situation. A rough guide: if more than a quarter of your check-in conversations have shifted into personal or emotional territory, that is a sign to refer out
  • Making promises about confidentiality that you cannot keep
  • Attempting to manage a situation involving serious mental health concerns, including any indication that someone may be a risk to themselves or others, without immediately involving a professional or appropriate support service

When in doubt, refer out. You do not need to have all the answers. You do not need to fix it. What you do need is a short list of resources and support options relevant to your context, whether that is an employee assistance programme, a mental health helpline, or simply the name of someone in your organisation whose job it actually is. That list should exist before you need it, not after. The resources section at the end of this toolkit is a starting point.

07 — Resources

Resources

This section is a starting point, not an exhaustive list. The resources here have been selected because they are relevant, reputable, and accessible globally. Where possible, I have prioritised free resources.

Crisis lines
Samaritans (UK) →

Call 116 123, available 24/7. Free to call from any phone.

988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline (US) →

Call or text 988. Available 24/7.

Befrienders Worldwide →

International directory of crisis centres. Find a centre near you at befrienders.org.

Games industry
Take This →

A nonprofit organisation working at the intersection of mental health and games. Probably the most comprehensive resource specifically for the games industry, covering burnout, layoffs, identity, and more. This toolkit was developed as part of their Accelerate Programme.

Safe in Our World →

A games-focused mental health charity with an extensive A-Z resource library covering everything from burnout and imposter syndrome to redundancy and workplace stress.

IGDA Harassment Resource →

The International Game Developers Association maintains a continuously updated resource for game developers dealing with online harassment, including legal guidance and support options across multiple countries.

Self-care tools
You Feel Like Sh*t: An Interactive Self-Care Guide →

A gentle, non-judgmental interactive tool that walks you through basic self-care questions when you are struggling and do not know where to start. Free and browser-based.

Everything is Awful and I'm Not Okay →

A simple checklist of basic self-care questions to work through when everything feels like too much. Honest, low-pressure, and widely shared in the games community.

Other resources
Take This: Burnout 101 →

A multi-part resource series covering what burnout actually is, the factors that contribute to it, and how to begin addressing it.

Take This: Navigating Layoffs →

Practical guidance for both those who have been laid off and those remaining at a studio after layoffs. Addresses the mental health impact on both groups.

Safe in Our World: Imposter Syndrome →

A focused resource on imposter syndrome including its causes and practical steps for managing it.

Safe in Our World: Redundancy Support →

Resources and guidance for those facing redundancy, including mental health support and practical next steps.

About

About this toolkit

"Known Issues" is a mental health toolkit for game producers developed by Natasha Arthur, as part of Take This's Accelerate Programme. This is not a clinical resource, and can't replace mental health treatment. Natasha Arthur is a game producer in Oslo, Norway that aims to make game production more sustainable by shining a light on mental health in relation to games. For this project, multiple producers and mental health experts were interviewed on these topics. The seniority ranges from AAA production directors, to indie solo-devs.

Image credits

All images throughout this toolkit are sourced from the National Gallery of Art Open Access collection and have been processed into a two-tone risograph style. NGA Open Access images are made available under Creative Commons Zero (CC0) and may be used freely without restriction.

National Gallery of Art Open Access →