The Games Winning Accessibility Awards This Summer, and the Skin That Funds the Work

Over one week in July, two separate industry award shows handed out a prize for accessibility, and both went to games with strong high contrast options. In the same stretch, a hugely popular mobile game turned one of its characters into a fundraiser for adaptive gaming, and a racing studio quietly published accessibility feature lists for six of its titles. None of these is a headline on its own. Together they read like a season in which making games playable by more people stopped being an afterthought and started being something the industry competes over and points to on purpose.

Here is what happened, and why it matters if you or someone you love needs certain settings to play.

Two award shows, two winners

The first came from the Develop:Star Awards at Develop:Brighton, a multi-day event that gathers the games industry from indie studios to the largest publishers. One of its categories is Best In-game Accessibility. This year it went to DOOM: The Dark Ages, which the organizers recognized for its customizable difficulty, its visual accessibility, and its general approachability. The other shortlisted games were Dead Reset, Pine Hearts Mobile, Tiny Bookshop, Unseen Diplomacy 2, and Monument Valley 3, a spread that runs from a cosy bookshop simulator to a puzzle series.

The second came from the Games for Change Awards, handed out at the Games for Change Festival. Games for Change is a non-profit that supports game makers building experiences with social impact. For only the second time, its awards included an accessibility category, and this year it went to EA Sports FC 26. The accessibility outlet Can I Play That reported that the recognition covered the game’s High Contrast Mode, which works in competitive play, along with gameplay assists and other accessibility features.

Two things stand out. Both winners were singled out for high contrast options, the kind of feature that colourizes or outlines important elements on screen so that low-vision and colourblind players can tell characters and items apart. And Games for Change running an accessibility category for a second year running means the prize is becoming a fixture rather than a one-off.

The skin that funded the work

Alongside the awards came a fundraiser built into a game that millions of people already play. From 23 to 30 July, during Disability Pride Month, the studio Scopely ran a campaign called Play for Change in Stumble Guys, the physics-based party game where players tumble through obstacle courses. All proceeds from sales of the character skin Axel over that week were donated to SpecialEffect. The campaign window has now closed, but the story behind it is worth knowing.

Axel is one of more than a thousand skins in Stumble Guys, and the only one who uses a wheelchair. The design was inspired by superheroes and racing wheelchairs, with a futuristic three-wheeled chair, and it was created after a young player named Fayçal, who uses a wheelchair himself, prompted the studio to add disability representation to the game. The skin was released last year, and its reception has been overwhelmingly positive.

SpecialEffect, the charity the campaign supported, is a UK organization that helps people with physical disabilities keep playing games. It does this through custom adaptive control setups and accessibility guides, a collection of eye-gaze games, and EyeMine, a tool that lets people play Minecraft using eye control. For developers, it also publishes the SpecialEffect DevKit, a resource to help studios make their own games more accessible. It is one of a growing number of groups doing this work, several of which we have gathered in our guide to the organizations making gaming accessible.

Not only the new releases

The last piece of the summer is the least flashy and, in some ways, the most useful. In mid-July, the racing studio Milestone published accessibility feature lists for six of its games at once, including MotoGP 25 and MotoGP 26, Screamer, Ride 6, Monster Energy Supercross 25, and the older Monster Jam Showdown.

The two MotoGP games share most of their features. Both allow one-handed control, mouse and keyboard input on consoles, and adjustable game speed in offline play. Both have adjustable menu text size, colourblind options, subtitles, tinnitus-friendly audio settings, and a mono audio option, with the newer MotoGP 26 adding full controls remapping. What makes the move notable is that Milestone included older titles as well. A player deciding whether a game they already own or are about to buy will work for them can now check, rather than guess, well after a game’s launch.

Why this matters before you buy

For a player who needs them, these are not extras. Customizable difficulty can be the difference between finishing a level and putting the controller down. A high contrast mode can decide whether the action on screen is readable at all. Remappable controls and one-handed play open a game to people who cannot use a standard controller in the standard way.

What the awards and the published feature lists add is visibility. When an industry prize rewards accessibility, and when a studio documents exactly which settings a game includes, that information moves out of forums and into the open, where a person can weigh it before spending money. Once a game is in hand, the next step is finding those settings, and we have a walkthrough for turning on the accessibility settings on Xbox, PlayStation and Nintendo Switch. The games named here are global releases, available to players in Canada the same as anywhere else. If you have held off on a game because you did not know whether it would meet you where you are, this is a summer where more of that information is finally on the table.

By the Living Unlimited Team

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