Devolver Co-Founder Announces New Publisher Focused on Games That Improve Mental Health
Devolver Digital co-founder Mike Wilson is beginning to make a habit of turning career disillusionment into hope.
He’s been candid in the past about how the fall of his first major endeavor, Gamecock Media Group, was a good thing — its efforts to humorously lampoon the industry were more bully than benevolent. But its demise led to the founding of Devolver Digital, keeping the good-natured snark while redefining indie relationships with publishers. Wilson also co-founded Good Shepherd Entertainment in a further effort to push back against what he saw as harmful practices in indie publishing, and joined the board of gaming mental health charity Take This. And he’s done numerous speaking engagements on the importance of good mental health, often drawing from his own struggles and personal experiences to offer encouragement to others.
Not long ago, Wilson found himself once again disillusioned with his career path, and feeling like he was “part of the problem” in an increasingly crowded, messy, often toxic, and at times predatory games industry. He tells me he felt “done with digital everything.”
It was in that headspace during a period of pseudo-retirement that Wilson met Ryan Douglas, a roboticist and former CEO of medical device company Nextern, who was in a similar state of disillusionment with the med-tech industry. The two began playing tennis together and talking about their respective fields…eventually arriving on the ways in which others had tried, and failed to bring games and health together.
From Wilson’s perspective, he had seen firsthand the numerous benefits video games had on mental health especially. For instance, he had been receiving letters from all over the world about how Devolver-published Fall Guys had
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