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Measuring social impact: the SROI challenge for indie game developers
For many indie developers, the mission to create a positive impact is clear, but the numbers to prove it often are not. Even if “Serious Games” are created with measurable educational or therapeutic goals in mind, applying the SROI (Social Return on Investment) framework presents unique challenges.
How do you measure the value of “awareness”? And when the audience is international, how can you track the effects across different cultures and economies?
What exactly is SROI?
Developed in the late 1990s by the Roberts Enterprise Development Fund (REDF) and refined by Social Value International (SVI), SROI is a principle-based methodology that measures the social, environmental, and economic value created by your work.
Unlike a simple Return on Investment (ROI) which only tracks financial profit, SROI tells a story of change. For example, if your SROI analysis results in a ratio of 3:1, it means that for every €1 invested in your game, €3 of social value is generated for your players and the community.
The case of Relooted
Let’s take a powerful example: Relooted, developed by South African studio Nyamakop. In this Afrofuturist heist game, players take on the role of “ethical thieves” who recover stolen African artifacts (such as the Benin Bronzes or the Maqdala Crown) from Western museums to return them to their rightful owners.
The game is masterful in making complex colonial history accessible. However, calculating a traditional SROI for Relooted is difficult for two main reasons:
- The international audience: If a player in Germany learns about the Vigango statues, the “social value” of that knowledge is different than for a player in Kenya whose community is still awaiting restitution. Tracking these global outcomes requires resources that most indie studios do not have.
- Awareness vs. Action: Although the game succeeds in “rewriting the narrative of restitution,” converting a player’s change in perspective into monetary value requires complex financial proxies that, in a commercial context, may seem speculative.
Source: https://nyamakop.co.za/relooted/
A new perspective: SROI for the creative team
If measuring the impact on players seems like an impossible task, there is another effective way to use SROI: measuring the impact on the development team itself.
Video game development is often associated with fast pace and high stress. By applying the SROI framework internally, a studio can measure how the creative process improves the lives of its members:
- Entrepreneurial resilience: quantify the transferable skills and intellectual flexibility that developers acquire by managing the challenges of a social enterprise.
- Mental health and sense of belonging: use proxies to assess the sense of purpose and community built within a mission-driven team. In other sectors, up to 66% of users in social initiatives report a greater sense of belonging and 71% report improved mental health.
- Capacity building: the knowledge gained during production is a measurable social asset that provides the team with a stronger foundation for their next project.
Simplifying the Framework
You don’t need a 50-page report to get started. SROI is essentially a “Theory of Change” expressed in numbers. The main formula remains:
By focusing on materiality—measuring only what really matters to the team and the mission—SROI can be used as a “strategic compass” rather than just a reporting tool. It helps identify which parts of the development process create the most “human value,” allowing the studio’s culture to be oriented toward sustainability.
Practical Resources
If you want to try mapping your team’s impact, you can download the Impact Map template (in Excel format) here:https://www.socialvalueuk.org/resource/blank-value-map/
This spreadsheet includes preset formulas to calculate the ratio, allowing you to focus on the story of change that your team experiences every day.
Ultimately, SROI serves to “make the invisible visible.” Whether it’s reclaiming history in a digital world like Relooted or building a healthier, more competent team in reality, your work has value that goes far beyond the price of the game on Steam.