Core Value Examples for Videogame Companies

Core values are the corner stone of a unique and healthy company culture. I’ve already shared how to come up with your own in a previous essay. For today’s essay, I’ve pulled together some core value examples from other videogame companies that you can use as inspiration.

Before we dive in, let’s quickly review the requirements for good core values.

Core value requirements

Good core values need to be three things:

• Timeless: They should apply to your company (basically) forever
• Applicable to everyone: They need to be relevant to all people on all teams in your company, including leadership
• You would hold onto them even if doing so would be a disadvantage: They should be a point of pride to the degree that you’d hold onto them even if the market should change and put you at a disadvantage for doing so.

Value traps

In his Harvard Business Review article Make Your Values Mean Something, Patrick Lencioni warns us to also avoid three types of “value traps”:

• Aspirational values: values that you would like to hold, but don’t right now. For example, wanting to be an innovative company when you’re not (right now), does not warrant making innovation part of your core values.
• Permission-to-play values: values that you expect people to hold, whether they work for you or someone else. For example, professionalism and honesty are required everywhere, and don’t add much to your core values.
• Accidental values: values that got you to where you are now, but aren’t necessary to move forward. For example, hustling may have been important getting through the startup phase, but may not be needed (or, indeed, wanted) for the next leg of your journey.

Keeping these requirements in mind, let’s look at some examples from videogame companies. I’ve simply collected what I could find, you be the judge of the quality.

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Core value examples from videogames companies

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Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash

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