For this episode, we had the pleasure of hosting Latoya Peterson. Latoya lives at the intersection of emerging technology and culture. Named one of Forbes Magazine's 30 Under 30 rising stars in media, she is best known for the award-winning blog Racialicious.com - the intersection of race and pop culture. She is currently co-founder and CXO at Glow Up Games, a game studio working on their first title set in the world of HBO’s Insecure.  

What will you listen to in this podcast episode?

1. Minute 04:13 - An amazing background story on how GlowUp Games was created between Latoya Peterson and her partner Mitu.

2. Latoya shares with us how their game studio is focusing on the representation of a huge hidden market, for a market just like herself and her partner Mitu.

Minute 12:27 - "In 40 years of gaming, if I want to play as a black female character, I have like 12 opportunities [...]. Mitu was actually feeling the same way in terms of also being a brown-skinned girl, she is South Asian, specifically British, Bangladeshi, but in terms of, you know, not seeing the types of representation that she wants, types of stories and lived experiences [...]. So, one of the things that we ended up really wanting to focus on is the serving of what we were hoping with the largest hidden market of players, which are players like us, people who are already playing games, who already love games."

3. Latoya tells us how they started talking about GlowUp games as the Fenty beauty company in the entertainment industry so people could understand what they were trying to do because the industry still being very male-dominated:

Minute 14:30 - "(people) still think a young, white man is kind of like your ideal player, the person who's going to spend the most money, all these different things, so everything is calibrated towards that player. There's nothing wrong with that player. It's just that that's not the only thing in the world."

4. And Latoya continued telling us how even though there is data and players are giving feedback out to the industry on what they really want to see in games, it seems like it is still not heard enough:

Minute 18: 30 - "What was happening in the games industry, and what is still happening in the games industry is that they are hearing from customers, 'hey, we want to see more diverse stories, [...] players want to see more diverse experiences and the games industry is like, 'Yeah, but you know, what? Who cares?'

5.  Continuing the point from above, Latoya shares how this lack of data in the industry inspired GlowUp Games to create a new ecosystem where they try to gather as much data as possible to provide players with the best experience"

Minute 20:45 - "So, that was super enlightening for us and it became part of the value proposition we started building up as the company, which is like, Okay, we're going to understand our player better than anyone else and we want to have data that nobody else has. [...] We didn't think we need to change it ecosystem. But that's ultimately what ended up happening. We do need to change the ecosystem around video games."