On Wednesday, more than 30 participants joined the Gamebadges Futures Workshop to help shape what could come next after the current Gamebadges project. The workshop brought together the ecosystem’s end users and stakeholders: game industry professionals, game educators, and open badge experts, all sharing an interest in skills recognition, competence mapping and the future of micro-credentials in the game sector.
The current Gamebadges project has now been running for around 2.5 years and will come to an end in January 2027. The Futures Workshop was organised to ask a simple but important question: what should happen next?
The workshop was structured around three perspectives: what to keep, what to start, and what to abandon in a possible continuation project. After a short introduction, an update on the current state of Gamebadges, and greetings from EGDF – the European Games Developer Federation, participants worked in four thematic groups. These groups focused on ecosystem format, company adoption, VET and higher education adoption, and other use contexts such as masterclasses, monetisation and private education providers.
What should definitely be kept?
A strong message across the groups was that the Competence Map should remain at the core of Gamebadges. Participants saw it as a valuable way to make game industry roles, competences and career paths more visible and understandable. The badge structure was also appreciated for its granularity, which helps break competences into smaller, more approachable parts.
The workshop also confirmed the value of Gamebadges as a learning path and self-evaluation tool. Schools and higher education institutions saw clear potential in using the ecosystem to support curriculum design and student guidance, while company representatives saw possible value in using the Map to structure competence needs internally.
What should be started or developed further?
The discussion highlighted several areas for future development. One key theme was the need to respond to rapid changes in the industry, especially in relation to AI and evolving competence needs. Participants also emphasised that future development should focus on making the ecosystem easier to adopt in practice and more clearly connected to real working-life contexts as well as educational use.
Another strong theme was recognition and credibility. Participants discussed lighter ways to support adoption, including stronger connections between Gamebadges and existing recruitment, HR and professional development practices, as well as possible integration with HR platforms. They also emphasised the need for stronger industry recognition and clearer value propositions for employers: the ecosystem would benefit from better awareness and understanding of micro-credentials on the industry side — a challenge that still affects the wider uptake of micro-credentials across Europe. Questions of sustainability and monetisation were likewise seen as essential to the long-term viability of the ecosystem. In addition, future development may need to consider different levels of validation more explicitly, in order to balance accessibility, credibility and practical adoption.
What should be left behind?
Compared with the other two perspectives, this part raised fewer clear conclusions. In general, participants did not identify large parts of the ecosystem that should be abandoned altogether. Instead, the discussion suggested that the focus should be on simplifying what is too heavy, improving what is difficult to adopt, and avoiding features or processes that create complexity without sufficient value.
There was also a sense that future development should remain realistic in scope. Rather than trying to solve every problem at once, the next phase should focus on the most meaningful and sustainable use cases for the ecosystem.
A strong signal to continue
What the workshop made clear is that the Gamebadges ecosystem already contains elements that many people find valuable: a shared competence language for the game industry, tools for career development and curriculum design, and a foundation for future credentialing and training. At the same time, the discussions showed that adoption, validation, sustainability and integration all need further work.
The continuation of the work also received strong support from EGDF. That support matters, because Gamebadges is not only a project about badges — it is increasingly a broader discussion about how competences are described, recognised and trusted in the European game sector.
Still, this workshop was only the beginning. Many participants felt that each topic could easily have supported much longer discussion, and several open questions clearly require deeper follow-up. In that sense, the Futures Workshop did exactly what it was meant to do: start the conversation. The actual planning work begins now.
Gamebadges is aiming to prepare for next year’s funding call, with the goal that a possible continuation project could start in 2028. If you are interested in being involved in the next phase, we invite you to fill in the Expression of Interest form. You can define the collaboration that might interest you, and submitting the form does not commit you to anything at this stage. We will contact respondents as the follow-up planning moves forward.