Brenda Romero

Brenda Romero is a game designer, author, and Studio Director/CEO of Romero Games. She’s been making games since the early days of the industry, working on everything from Wizardry to indie passion projects like The Mechanic is the Message. Along the way, she’s picked up a BAFTA  and a bunch of other awards, but she’s mostly in it for the joy of creating and collaborating with great people. Brenda speaks often about game design, leadership, and building better, more inclusive teams.

Retaining Institutional Knowledge in Games: Why It Matters and How to Use It

In every game studio that has clocked over ten years as a company, there are a few highly valuable developers who have been with the company many years across many projects. Whether they are high-level leadership or staff, these employees are often considered crucial for helping projects understand proprietary tools, a studio’s unique design philosophy, best practices, and trade secrets. More importantly, these long-time developers know the ins and outs of a studio’s spoken and unspoken history, culture, and foundation. In research, these developers hold what is called institutional knowledge. For game studio leaders, retaining institutional knowledge is one of the most critical components in ensuring their games, developers, and company succeeds. 

Yet industry-wide institutional knowledge has become harder to retain as mass layoffs, organizational realignments, and developers switching studios mid-project has become more common.

This panel will be a discussion between three industry leaders at companies with long-standing histories who believe institutional knowledge is the secret to a studio’s long-term success. They will discuss how institutional knowledge has impacted their studios for the better and how leaders of studios can leverage it in a way to build healthier teams, save money, and create stronger games.